davis_square | (no subject)

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parking

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Nothing says All American City quite like fifty dollar parking tickets for forgetting to put a two cent placard up on the dashboard.

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It is kind of high. $30 seems a more reasonable ceiling for such an offense, and it's what I think I was fined for a similar misdeed in Fort Point (though in that case, it was the horrible signage that led me to believe I was parked legally). But that was a couple of years ago -- maybe they've gone up everywhere, I don't know.

Why are you using a guest pass if it's at your house?

It was a rental car.

I got home Sunday night just before midnight. Forgot to put the pass up. The ticket was written an hour later at 1am. I discovered the ticket at 4:45am.

somervillema.gov now allows you to contest parking tickets online so I'm going to do that as soon as the ticket gets "in" to the system. When I tried to contest it already this morning it found no record of the citation.

and by 'contest' i mean that i'm going to beg for leniency

Monday at 1am? That's gets kind of evil. It's like when they blanket Orchard St at five minutes to midnight on Saturday night.

Five minutes to midnight on a Saturday night is precisely when they should be out in force: That's when illegally parked bar-goers are most likely to be keeping you from parking anywhere near your house.

Agreed. Go bother the bar goers. I live on a nice quiet residential street with no bars.

Ticketing at 11:55 is just being a dick and has nothing to do with any concern for local residents. Even 11:30 isn't so bad. What's so special about just before midnight in regarding to keeping you from parking near your house? If they just idled in their car for those five minutes, they'd be clear for the next 24 hours, after all.

That's actually a typical time for T&P - I've seen them out at all hours.

Contesting it may work, but a potential problem is that you aren't supposed to use a guest pass for your "own" car, only for visitors. (And I understand that this means that you can't park a borrowed/rented car anywhere but a driveway, which seems like a problematic hole in the regulations.)

There is a special temporary permit you can get for a rental car. (Of course, I've gotten a ticket even with one of these displayed, but when I contested it they dismissed it without even checking whether I had applied for a temporary permit, so I think the OP should be able to get this ticket dismissed with no problem.)

Yeah I will ask for clarification on this if I go to the parking office. Every time I park a zip car at my house I use my guest passes. The idea that I need to go get a special temporary permit every time I rent a zip car is preposterous.

I think the main point of the rental car pass is that you can use it for longer than the two-day-a-week max of the guest permit. I don't expect them to give you any hassle for using the guest permit for a short term rental like a zipcar.

You don't, and the people at the parking office will tell you this.

The "controlled" thing on the guest pass is to keep you from using it in your company car that's registered somewhere other than Somerville, not to keep you from using it occasionally in a rental car. (And, as phoenixy says, you're not supposed to use it in a rental car for more than that two-day-a-week max.)

Yes. Just say that you parked the car in front of (address), you were visiting (address), and (address) has registered visitor passes in the system. It worked for my boyfriend when he got ticketed in front of my old Somerville apartment.

(That situation was extra special. He drove me home and came inside for a few minutes to help me carry some groceries. By the time he got back, his car was already being ticketed. When he protested and said that he was just dropping someone off and leaving right away, the officer seemed cool with it. Then he got a notice in the mail saying that payment was late on the ticket that he never actually received -- apparently they entered it into the system anyway, without telling him. The city didn't care about that BS, but they waived the ticket when he invoked my all-powerful visitor pass.)

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