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Peeved with Parking Enforcement
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I have a serious principle problem with paying to park on the street.
Parking lots are one thing; someone owns that land and (hopefully) pays for upkeep and such and therefore earns the right to charge a fee for others to use it for temporary vehicle storage.
But public streets are quite another.
My taxes already pay for upkeep of said thoroughfares, and I see no reason why I should have to pay extra to stop my car and leave it in a spot for a time.
I’d argue leaving my car in a spot for an hour, or what have you, does no more damage to the roadway than simply driving on it.
So why do I have to pay extra? How does it cost the city more money for my car to be stopped rather than moving?
It makes me terribly vexed, and I think there is no reasonable justification for it.
But a Bailey couple has even more right to be angry than me.
Louis B. called me earlier this week to recount the most ridiculous parking story I’ve ever heard.
He told me the following:
His wife had gone to Cherry Creek this week for her monthly hair appointment, and upon returning to her legally parked car, found two surprises.
One was that another driver had bumped her car, knocking off the front license plate. The driver, having done no visible damage to her car, simply left the license plate on the hood of her car.
The second surprise is the real kicker: a city parking enforcement officer had ticketed the woman because the license plate was no longer attached to her front bumper.
(Colorado law stipulates vehicles must bear clearly visible license plates on both the front and ends.)
This story makes me so mad that I have to force myself not to swallow my own tongue.
Did the meter maid really have nothing better to do than to ticket someone, who obviously had already been victimized once, with their car having been struck by an errant parker?
Mr. B. told me the meter maid had obviously had had to reach across the felled license plate to put the ticket on his wife’s windshield.
For lack of a better term, that’s a real jackass move.
Mr. B says he called the mayor’s office to contest the completely ridiculous ticket, and was told they “they did not get into traffic citations.”
He called the traffic citation office. They told him they “could not handle this over the phone; that I had to write a letter to their division or come in person, downtown, to handle the matter.”
More nonsense.
So, Mr. B. isn’t going to shop in Denver anymore.
He’s not going to eat meals in our fair city anymore.
In fact, he told me, “I will avoid Denver as though it were Iran or Iraq. They may give me or my wife a ticket for dirty headlights, or heaven forbid a cracked windshield, or worse yet a low tire.”
And he’s calling for the parking enforcement person who ticketed his wife to be fired for gross ignorance of common sense.
But you know what? Some good has maybe come out of the situation.
Mr. B has come up with a great slogan to put on our city’s parking code enforcement vehicles.
“TO CHASE DOWN AND COLLECT.”
I think it’s got a nice ring to it.
