Parking Tickets

[lissie930.livejournal.com]

People may already know this, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to post it. I was chatting with one of the parking ticket officers today, and she mentioned that street cleaning tickets have gone up to $50. Also, parking without a permit in a permit area is now $40, and the snow emergency ticket has gone up to $100!!

Comments

[thebostonian.livejournal.com]

Car(e)free is the way to go.

[turil.livejournal.com]

That, or... parking legally!

Though I personally prefer the carfree route.

But I've also considered the idea of car sharing with a group of friends/neighbors. This seems like a perfect solution for those who find they want a car sometimes.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Zipcar?

[turil.livejournal.com]

Zipcar is pretty expensive, especially since they charge a membership fee in addition to the hourly rates. My husband is a car fan, and he ends up renting them fairly regularly. He discovered that it's much, much cheaper to rent a car for a day/weekend/week than it would cost to use a Zipcar. And who really wants to use a car for just a few hours? The only time I really can use a car is when I'm going on a vacation trip to a part of the country where there is no public transit.

I actually used to have a free Zipcar membership (though my job) and I never used it. I may even still have it, but I haven't even considered using a Zipcar for the past couple of years.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

(And parking legally can be a lot harder than it sounds. Here in Arlington, the town council routinely votes down making onstreet overnight parking legal (I think it's legal in a few parts of town, but only a few). The houses were by and large built before people had driveways, so many of them don't have driveways or room to put them. And now, of course, most people own cars (and only the very eastern edge of town is sufficiently served by public transportation to make being carfree a good option). The number of cars in town dramatically exceeds the amount of legal parking which is available or can be created. Voila -- large-scale illegal parking.)

[turil.livejournal.com]

A good reason to lobby the MBTA or at least the town to start providing quality public transit for Arlington.

Davis Square, on the other hand, has amazing public transit service.

[protogeek.livejournal.com]

Yep, I and some of my friends haave been bitten by that recently. Sounds like they pretty much doubled everything.

[dj-daeva.livejournal.com]

sadly, i personally already found out about the street cleaning tickets the hard way :o\

<3

[guxx.livejournal.com]

Ditto. Though I'll be appealing the ticket.

[komos.livejournal.com]

Gentrification is a beautiful thing.

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

Ummm...I'm not sure how this statement would follow?

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Easy. People have gotten richer, so you can soak them for more in parking tickets. Additionally, they've probably bought more cars, making parking spaces a rarer resource, which makes them naturally more expensive. (Really, parking tickets and the like are just an indirect way of charging for parking spaces.)

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

An interesting theory. For my part, I thought that the parking ticket and property tax increases might be a side effect of reduced funding from the state, along with jumps in energy, health and pension costs (http://www.ci.somerville.ma.us/section.cfm?org=mayor&page=167).

[turil.livejournal.com]

Except that the point of parking tickets is to discourage people from parking illegally (dangerously and/or disrespectfully). You pretty much only get a ticket if you've broken the law. Rich people are generally more likely to break the law, since with the acquision of money often comes a sense of entitlement. So I'd bet that far more rich people - or at least middle class - are getting these tickets.

I wonder how high a ticket would need to be to actually stop a person from violating the law...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Right, that's exactly my point. As the neighborhood gets richer, the amount you have to charge to make parking tickets an adequate disincentive to illegal parking increases. Otherwise it becomes just a cost they factor into their budget, just like renting a parking space.

(Stephen Leavitt in Freakonomics notes something like this. An Israeli day care was upset that people kept picking up their kids late, so they started charging a fine every day this happened -- a $3 fine. Since that was much cheaper than what parents could have gotten away with in terms of private stopgap babysitting, or lost productivity at work, parents started leaving their kids there late in droves.)

[zzbottom.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it went hand-in-hand with the meter rates doubling, too.

BostonSweeper.com

[an-art-worker.livejournal.com]

Maybe well known - but if not - the BostonSweeper.com site (since bought by the Boston Globe) is a reliable reminder service @ street-cleaning. I haven't been caught in a couple of years. It's maybe on of the most useful email services...