Parking News Update
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the wild world of parking news - updated daily!
2/9/10
A growing numbers of institutions have found parking fees a very appealing revenue add-on to their regular cash flows. This includes hospitals, universities, and sports stadiums. Thus in Dallas, where the city has a deal with the local Cowboys football team to divvie up parking revenues on game days, they take poorly to others taking a slice of this pie. According to local newspaper reports, a chap who over the football season allowed Cowboy fans to park on his property near the stadium on game days is being fined for these transgressions — and being billed $120,000 for his crime. Even in free enterprise-oriented Texas, it seems, monopolies don't like small entrepreneurs taking their share.
Here's a tale we recently came across from the seedy annals of Philadelphia ticketing. A woman got a ticket for parking in a no-parking zone. A pricey ticket — $96 worth. Except she wasn't parked. She saw a friend standing in the street, opened her driver's side window, handed the friend a package, and chatted for two minutes with the motor of her car still running. No meter maid was in sight, but apparently one was hiding nearby, because the ticket arrived by mail a week later. Moral of the story? Don't stop with the motor running on Philly while dropping something off to a friend. Throw it at the friend without stopping and get out of the city poste haste.
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A quarter century has passed since that book first appeared. The lords of parking, however, everywhere in the country, have only gotten nastier and more predatory. This fact is obvious in countless ways. In stories about the parking disaster in Chicago after that city sold its parking rights to a private firm; in New York where a man lay slumped dead over his steering wheel in a vehicle on which meter maids had plastered dozens of tickets; in Philadelphia where a cable TV show actually exalts the activities of the local ticketing constabulary.
It's obvious that the time has arrived to mount a new crusade against Parking Horrors, this time a crusade with a national rather than a single city focus—an Internet-based crusade retaining our old grotesquely funny and appropriately disrespectful approach to an often grotesque subject that richly merits a disrespectful skewering.
As part of this effort we are also calling for your own parking horror stories to post on this site—comments that might embarrass some local parking authorities and perhaps even incline them to improve their behavior.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of parking
authorities is for abused motorists to do nothing."
Colette Silverwood
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