"To start, I found the top address where this ticket were given: in front of 575 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years. To my surprise, the spot, (or really spots since there are two ramps), are legal,"
By the way, a friend just tried to park in the spot that I got towed out of. That's how unassuming it looks. That's just a thing you get to learn if you happen to live here, and the only way you learn it is after you get towed. Not a damn thing you can do about it other than pay up.
And how about the $120 ticket the other day for making a left at a light that was green but happened to be labeled no left turn without an arrow? No reason not to be able to turn left, as long as it was green. There wasn't any oncoming traffic. Yeah we missed the sign, and for that we get to pay $120 to follow the silly rule. The tickets add up faster than you think.
Are you complaining that you got a ticket for committing an infraction?
It's one thing to complain about regulations that seem to make no sense to you; it's another for breaking those regulations, and then bitching that you got caught.
I'm by no means "perfectly vigilant" but if you're getting them with any regularity then that's just carelessness. That is something fixable by you, personally, rather than suggesting the systemic changes that you seem to want to see.
Personal responsibility for the small stuff, systemic change for the big stuff.
When the parking people patrol your car, specifically, every day, looking for any small mistake, you bet you'll get a ticket. The best is getting one for "illegally parked too far away from curb" when it's literally one foot away.
If you're arguing that tickets aren't a significant source of revenue for large cities, you may want to check the statistics. https://www.parkingpanda.com/blog/post/top-10-cities-with-hi...
Besides, in your original post, you said "Owning a car in a city ..." more than once.
But, in the spirit of charity, I actually went to the trouble of asking a couple friends who live in NYC and own cars, "hey do you get a lot of extraneous parking tickets?" According to them, no, it's not the problem you're making it out to be.
You'll have to do more to convince me that you're not just careless and want to blame someone else for it.
I'm glad your NYC friends are well-off, but different neighborhoods are different. The south side of various cities are completely different from north side. This isn't a new phenomenon, and it matters where your friends are. I don't think it's very wise to draw conclusions from a sample size of three.
Perhaps I'm an atypical example, but it sounds like my story resonated with a bunch of other people, so I'd bet the other way. That ~$50M/yr has to come from somewhere, and if the revenue started drying up, they'd simply invent more rules until it didn't.
You're not wrong about the carelessness, but given that I make sure to be careful where it matters, are you sure you want to reward the behavior you're defending? A life of papers and registrations, dotted i's and crossed t's is pretty annoying.
Yes, my plates were expired for one day, and I got a $60 ticket for it. Yep, I was somehow parked in a tow zone (that someone else tried to park in too, and I see multiple cars per month fall into the same trap) and so I got to pay over $400 when all was said and done. Yep, I turned left at a green light when there was no oncoming traffic even though the damn thing was marked "don't turn left without an arrow" and a cop was watching it like a hawk just to meet their quota.
Does that make it all my fault? Maybe. You can think what you want, but at least you aren't analyzed daily for any vulnerable patterns in your behavior to exploit.
Yup:
> UPS, FedEx and other commercial delivery companies pay a steep price for doing business in New York City, getting an average of 7,000 parking tickets every day and paying more than $102 million in fines in the city’s latest budget year.
> Atlanta-based UPS has a fleet of 1,000 trucks and receives about 15,000 tickets a month here. The company is the biggest offender in the city, paying $18.7 million in parking violations for the fiscal year ending June 30, according to city data. Memphis-based FedEx was second with $8.2 million.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14602712/ns/business-us_business/t...
> I turned left at a green light when there was no oncoming traffic even though the damn thing was marked "don't turn left without an arrow"
Dude.
Are we really in a situation where it's heretical to turn left when there's no traffic? Ok then.
If you didn't notice my other comment, we didn't see the sign. So maybe reserve judgement for whoever you like to judge.
The point of traffic laws are to mold behavior into healthy patterns, not to generate money for the city. That's the goal, anyway. If you're really defending a "don't turn left without an arrow under any circumstances," then I couldn't disagree more strongly with your stance.
You haven't done traffic studies. You don't know the traffic flow at that intersection. You don't know how often there were accidents before that sign was placed. You say that the point of traffic laws is to mold behavior into healthy patterns, but unless you're perched up above that intersection for a month, 24/7, taking notes, you have no idea what is or isn't healthy there.
It's a Chesterton's fence situation.
> If you're really defending a "don't turn left without an arrow under any circumstances," then I couldn't disagree more strongly with your stance.
I'm not. See above.
> Are we really in a situation where it's heretical to turn left when there's no traffic?
It's not heretical, but it is illegal. If you do illegal things, you can expect to eventually get caught. You're not fighting segregated schools here, this isn't a moral crusade.
> If you didn't notice my other comment, we didn't see the sign.
I actually didn't. I do apologize; you sounded totally unrepentant about it in the comment I replied to.
All it takes is for the city to outsource the parking patrol to some for profit company and let them take a cut of the fines. This is what happened in my relatively small city (population of ~150k). Next election pretty much nobody of the ones that were pushing for that got voted back in to the city government.
The total bill? $500
Shit happens everywhere, but owning a car in Brooklyn was a level of hassle I'm not prepared to ever deal with again.
Carbon offsets cost about $100/year or less.
Auto crashes supposedly cost a trillion a year in direct costs and lost time, but those costs are mostly absorbed by insurance, employers and individuals, so don't factor into the $2k/year figure.
Interested to see corroborating or contradicting data.
It doesn't help that so many of the signs related to parking are sufficiently complicated that I rarely have full confidence that I'm 100% legal.
The latest naked revue grab is switching a lot of the 2 hr. parking meters from ending at 6pm to ending at 8pm. It's not so much paying for the extra 2 hours of parking but that, when coming in for dinner and a show, I pretty much have to be parked before 6pm. (And I've been ticketed for feeding the meter.)
Oh gosh, don't get me started on this. It's theft, plain and simple. Or rather tax. Owning a car in a city is a massive pain in the butt, and it's cost me like $2k per year. Whether it's bullshit tickets, street cleaning gotchas, expired plates (got a ticket one day after it expired just yesterday), being parked in a valid parking spot that is nevertheless a tow zone for mysterious reasons, having to go in front of a judge to point out that it was bullshit for me to be towed because the facility that I had to visit to pay for the ticket was closed due to a holiday, on and on and on. You get the idea.
I've sort of resigned myself to it just being "car stuff," so whenever another crap ticket appears on my window it doesn't bug me much. Just more tax for the city. Whatever.
I know a few of the tickets are my fault, but geez, it seems almost impossible to be a perfectly law-abiding car owner in a major city over the course of five years.
It's actually tempting to rent out my car to someone else just to cover the administrative cost of owning a car in a city.