While sitting in our living room late on Tuesday night, Mr. 14th & You and I saw the flashing blue lights of not an MPD vehicle, but parking enforcement. This civil servant came out at 11:45 p.m. to ticket two cars with Virginia license plates for failure to display DC tags. I'll never know, but I'm curious as to whether parking enforcement had been stalking these vehicles and knew that he could nab them around midnight or whether perhaps a neighbor turned in the out-of-state cars. Lastly, how does the city know that these cars belong to city residents who have simply failed to get DC tags? A car with out-of-state plates parked nightly on the street could belong to an overnight shift worker or the significant other of a neighborhood resident. Perhaps the owners had applied for temporary residential parking permits that had since expired?
On a somewhat related note, the DC Department of Public Works has determined that 12,834 vehicles are "boot eligible" due to non-payment of photo enforcement tickets. Parking enforcement is aggressively searching for these scofflaws in an effort to collect the nearly $2 million in speeding and red light fines they have racked up.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Bummer
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4 comments:
Am I the only one who has noticed that sometimes the "ticket time" and the actual time are incorrect?
I paid the ticket because I figured that there was no way to really prove it, but one time I parked my car downtown at 6:30 and got a "ticket" at 5:49. Seems odd.
They do the same thing in VA all the time. They stalk non-VA plates and begin to ticket the hell out of them until they get VA plates. I'm sure they could do a search easy enough to find whether the owner lives in DC or not.
There are a lot of what-ifs, but most likely the car belongs to someone who lives in the city but hasn't bothered to change their plates yet. If you walk around Columbia Heights at night, it seems like there's a slow infiltration of Maryland plates once the enforcement guys go home.
Reality is typically dictated by physics, and the laws of physics clearly indicate that there is not enough room for all the cars in DC or in the greater Washington area.
What if I live in your 'hood and come home late at night from a business trip in my car bearing DC plates to find there are no parking spaces within a half mile of my home, but I see several cars with VA and MD tags parked on my block?
Actually, this has happened to me many times.
I'm glad to see/hear that parking enforcement activity continues late into the night.
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