To self-serve and protect -- our own interests...

[inkarn8.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know why the City would ticket Somerville's own residents for expired inspection stickers? -- Two tickets 3 days apart? If I owned a driveway, they would not have done this... Can't they stick to the spirit of protecting our residential parking spots from outsiders? How about a warning instead, or a friendly reminder? And then a few days to get a sticker...

And why do they ticket cars after the street cleaner has already passed? I don't get any of those tickets for that reason, but it seems silly to not be able to park after the cleaner has clearly already passed... Is anyone else interested in getting some of these unfriendly policies changed? Also, why do we pay an extra Internet fee to pay tickets and update parking passes for a service which clearly must save the city time and money from waiting on us in person? How does the city award the contract to an Internet company which is making so much money for so little service?

Does anyone have a list of local politicians that support these policies and another list of who would rather see changes made?

Thanks so much!

Comments

Late to this.

[oneagain.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with the OP here. We used to get reminders in the mail that we needed to deal with this; then we got tickets, and getting a second ticket (or 4 or 5 right after when the law had *just* changed) on a car still parked in the same location, with the ticket still on it, is rather offensive. It is the law that this can be done; I agree wtih the argument that it should not be, and that it targets folks who already have less resources (an off-street parking spot, to start with) than it does others. And $20 is a lot better than $50; I'm not even sure why that would be an argument except to someone who does not have money issues (see below comment about privilege). I'm glad there are people talking about this who can afford to do so, because the folks disproportionaely hit are going to have less focus to do so, and that is how it is designed--hit folks less likely to be *able* to make a fuss over it. But then I think much of what the Somerville Parking folks do is evil, even more evil than this--but I'm certainly not going to dissuade someone from speaking up against something that they think is wrong when those disproportionately hit by these sorts of things don't have as much capacity for it. And the whole "there are things more evil than this, why this" argument does not fly with me; the more rules there are out there, the harder it is to summon the energy to get at all of them, and this kind of thinking supports that maneuver. I'm glad the OP is saying something here. As for the burden of figuring out how to keep track of warnings? I think this could be dealt with if it was important; I don't think only things that make money for the city are worth the bother; there is value in having Somerville be friendlier, which is the opposite direction it has been going in this manner, and we seem to forget that the people making these decision are theoretically working for *us*, so including our values in their job descriptions does not seem strange to me.

Also, thinking it is easy to have the focus to get this dealt with before a ticket happens is a form of priveledge, particularly when poorer folks have so damned many *more* things to look out for all the time as it is. I noticed the person above siding with you said that they'd gotten a ticket, but that it was their problem; it's not hard to miss these deadlines, and to say "it's on your windshield, you have no excuse" really does not take into account the realities of many, apparently including the person above siding with you, which is why they make money on it. I agree with friendlier policies. I hate what the parking situation has become here; where I live, there amount of parking available to me did not changed when the rules became more stringent; the changes were completely for revenue and just made even more hoops to jump through to have gatherings, especially when they were impromptu (one of the oringal appeals of this part of Somerville) and thinking this is fair and reasonable when it wasn't needed is a form of brainwashed denial as far as I am concerned.

RE: Late to this.

[avjudge]

Oneagain, I completely agree with you and am posting to say so because the loudest voices here (other than the OP) seem to have been those that say the city should grab everything from us it can and it's solely our problem if we don't (or can't) stay on top of everything.

To support what you say, I have a driveway and last summer from May through August blissfully (=ignorantly) drove around with an expired sticker - for some reason I thought I'd already had it done, until I went in for an oil change and the garage pointed it out to me (and inspected me). I have no excuse except that years go by so fast that it felt like just yesterday I'd had it inspected, and like anything you look at every day that sticker became invisible to me - so much for "it's there to remind you every day." I could do this because I'm rich - well, not actually rich, but well-off enough to own a driveway in this city. Also a 50ish white female, so cops are generally not going to profile me as anything but boring.

I've been here - not forever, but since 2006 - long enough to see the city put these parking and ticketing changes in place, and I've been reading the local papers online for that time, and the city has never tried to hide the fact that the changes were, first and foremost, a source of revenue - a "gotcha" source of revenue - not primarily in the interest of helping anyone, and certainly not in response to the desires of the population that - in theory - the government represents.

RE: Late to this.

[oneagain.livejournal.com]

Thanks for speaking up. I'm pretty behind on reading lj, but it's probably just as well, not interested in an argument (and folks can get mean here), so I commented on the entry and not to the last thread--but I did want the OP to feel supported, and I wanted it on file, so to speak, that I agree wholeheartedly. It helps when folks who have privilege in these areas acknowledge this to the end, among other things, to help those who don't--so I thank you both.