Since the start of this year, it has gotten harder and harder to do business in the City of Los Angeles what with all the new fees, fines and taxes that make everything not just more expensive but also increasingly harder and harder to get anything done. Still, after a particularly tough few weeks and thinking I had seen every possible way the City could extract money from it's citizens, I spotted a new low last night at 10 PM.
Walking down an empty street, I saw a city employee ticketing a car parked in a commercial loading zone. Surprised, I asked the officer wasn't it legal for a car to park in in a commercial loading zone at night? The officer replied, yes. I think then asked if that was the case - then why was this car being ticketed? There was now no answer. I asked a second time, with no answer, and then a third time, but there was still no answer.
The officer then got into city car and drove away. Another person shortly walked up and we speculated on why the car was ticketed. The only possible answer we could come up with was that while the front tire was almost touching the curb, the rear tire was further way from the curb. The car behind this vehicle had parked - legally - at the very end of its space and that had made it hard for this car to pull into its space.
But the tire didn't seem to be at all far enough from the curb to warrant a ticket, though the angle of the car did somewhat exaggerate the distance - and a couple other cars on the same block were also parked with a tire the same distance from the curb but none of them received tickets. This car was also parked well within the white marks on the street side of the parking space and so this now ticketed car was in no way a hazard to passing traffic.
That left only one option for us to consider. That every night a certain number of tickets have to be written and a certain amount of money has to be raised and the officers who patrol each night have no choice but to select those whose turn it is to pay that night.
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4 comments:
next time, just open up the unsealed envelope and check the reason code
Not really something I would want to do. But the person's refusal to say why after they admitted that it was legal to parking a loading zone made me suspicious. Then in the days since then I see the parking enforcement cars hovering in the area morning, noon and night. And at night they manage to do a lot of ticketing to cars that are parked in legal spaces.
In Santa Monica a ticket is issued if the front license plate is missing. Perhaps the vehicle registration tags were outdated?
The other person there with me thought of that - which I had not, since I have not driven in over ten years - and the plates were intact and the tags were current.
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