Reminder: Street Sweeping Begins Anew March 23

Ahhh, springtime. The flowers begin to blossom, the temperatures begin to rise, and DC parking enforcement begins ticketing cars who dare fail to respect the street sweeping regulations.

Beginning this Monday, street sweeping regulations will once again be enforced, which means alternate-side parking will be in effect until the fall. And if you think you might get lucky as you have in years past when you avoided that $30 ticket when DC Parking Enforcement somehow missed the car you forgot to move the night before, those days are probably numbered. According to DPW's website:

Recently, DPW introduced “Sweepercam,” the newest application of license plate recognition technology to improve street sweeping effectiveness. The technology consists of cameras mounted on street sweepers to photograph vehicles illegally parked in the curb lane of residential and commercial streets during day and night sweeping hours. The sweeper operator switches on the camera, which photographs the vehicle’s license tag, the vehicle and the vehicle’s position on the street. The registered owner will receive a ticket in the mail that will include these photographs.

Wow, that's a move totally out of the Catbert, Evil Human Resources Director playbook. In fact, we put that up there with the chump move DC is known for in this regard, which is sending the street sweeper along a street ten minutes before street sweeping regulations begin, and then two hours later a parking enforcement vehicle comes through and tickets cars that are parked there.

DPW swears that the program effectively removes significant amounts of trash, debris and pollutants from our city's streets, and they may very well be right. But it doesn't make the parking regulations any less of a pain in the a$$.