When you criticized the New York City Council's unanimous decision to abolish the stickers that the Sanitation Department has long used to punish alternate-side parking violators, you endorsed the department's argument that the stickers have led to cleaner streets.
But by segregating cases against housing code violators, unscrupulous tour operators, noisemakers, pet owners and parking violators, the city hopes to send the message that it definitely is sweating the small stuff.
The officials - from throughout the region, from Connecticut to New Jersey - said they were more aggressively pursuing parking violators with such measures as impounding the cars of scofflaws and improving computer systems to track down motorists with unpaid fines.
It seems that so many parking violators were taking advantage of the reduced fines that the city was actually losing money on the offer — something of an irony, since the program began in 2007 to reduce a backlog of unpaid tickets.
In the last year alone, the most innovative display of activism has sprung from the Streetpanthers, a band of thirtysomethings who under cover of night prowl the streets of Athens slapping the vehicles of egregious parking violators with Day-Glo orange stickers depicting a donkey in a car above the message, "I park wherever I want".
Handicap parking violators (Also known as "the bane of my existence"), are freaking everywhere.
Make the minimum fine for a parking violation $500 ,find 20 violators per day (grossly underestimated) and put 3.6 million dollars back into the budget per year.
By E. Gerlach and Geoffrey T. Hellman The New Yorker, August 4, 1951 P. 18 Parking violating notice that is used by the police of Rothenburg ob der Tauber to deal with parking offenders: Dear Traffic Laws Violator: Rothenburg is a nice old town, there is nothing wrong, we trust, with our letting you know that existing traffic laws have to be obeyed here, too.
Thing 2 finds a mock parking sign: "Stoner Parking Only — Violators will be … ah, whatever, dude". And Thing 2.5 wants the life-size George Clooney cardboard standee.
Traffic cameras and handheld computers used by the traffic police cannot handle Arabic script, so a clamp sometimes becomes the only way to enforce a parking penalty or to assure that violators are brought to justice.
