Two thousand bucks is like one and a half ticket-tow combos in Manhattan. And it's ~impossible to avoid legal problems if you street park a car in the city.
"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,"
It's not just tickets. It's tickets + permits + insurance + plates. I wasn't blaming anyone else, either. I assume you're perfectly vigilant in every aspect of your life? Meh, never mind.
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.
> 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?
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.
Man, I have owned a car in a medium-sized city for something like 20 years and I can count on both hands the number of tickets I've gotten.
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.
May I suggest that owning a car in a medium-sized city is a bit different from owning one in one of the largest cities in the world? (Top 25.)
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.
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.
Not a single one of my tickets were for speeding. I forgot to mention that, so I think it's more likely that this animosity is from people equating tickets = lunatic driver. I drive like an old man on the road.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The point of traffic laws are to mold behavior into healthy patterns,
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.
That no-left sign is there for a reason. For example, there's a similar innocentlylooking intersection near my place. There were identical crashes weekly. It was especially dangerous with seemingly no traffic due to poor visibility for incoming traffic. Now left turn is forbidden and all is good.
> May I suggest that owning a car in a medium-sized city is a bit different from owning one in one of the largest cities in the world? (Top 25.)
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.
I live in the top 25 and I never get tickets. I do however see idiots getting towed from spots clearly marked as reserved for food trucks all the time, sometimes 2 different cars towed at the same time from the same food truck spot.
Meanwhile, I got towed when I was away for the weekend at a close friend's wedding, flying back into SF from Seattle Monday morning, and a sign was literally placed either Saturday or Sunday night saying that cars parked on my street after 8 AM Monday would get towed due to construction. I got there at 10 AM, and my car was gone, and there was no construction yet either.
I'll have to agree with you. Having owned cars both in small and medium-sized cites and also while living a few blocks south of the 575 Ocean Avenue spot mentioned earlier, I was very happy to no longer have to deal with parking/owning a car in NYC.
Shit happens everywhere, but owning a car in Brooklyn was a level of hassle I'm not prepared to ever deal with again.
