So, we were just in Philadelphia on a business trip. No knock on Philadelphia - great city. But, we pulled into our hotel on Monday (no hotel pull off lane, no bellman out front- a lesser Hilton brand hotel ) -had to park on the city street in front and go inside to get a cart for our luggage. We parked in a 30 minute hotel patron zone. By the time we got back outside (less than 5 minutes), we were already being ticketed. She said she already started to write the ticket and could not void it.
We were clearly a hotel patron, pulling in to check in before we could park in the adjacent garage. She said the bellman should have told us that you needed a placard in your car indicating you were a hotel patron. There was no bellman! The city sign indicated 30 minutes but no indication that a placard had to be displayed. No outside hotel signs indicated that either . And even if you had to display one, you still have to have a few minutes to go inside and get one ! Just doesn’t seem logical, but maybe I’m missing something here? The city parking person said we could take the ticket to the parking authority office with the hotel info that we were hotel guests and they should be able to waive/void the ticket. I stood in line for 40 minutes, only to be told that was not accurate- we had to mail in evidence or request a web hearing with a hearing officer.
It was a $51 ticket. Would have been easier to just pay it ! But, I sent off a statement today, pictures of signs, etc. I doubt we’ll prevail but I did not just want to do nothing. We are very careful about obeying signs. This experience was very interesting!
Philly, which is otherwise a great city, is truly notorious for its parking enforcement. They are well staffed, quick, and it is cumbersome to get things reversed. Must be a good revenue source for the city.
You might prevail. Sometimes fighting it is enough.
My daughter had an interesting parking ticket experience this past summer. She had parked for longer than 2 hours in a 2 hour zone in Camden, Maine. When she returned to her car, there was an envelope with a parking ticket, but someone had also put in money covering half the amount!
When my daughter moved a few years ago, a friend agreed to drive her for the cross-half-the-country trip. The friend’s vehicle was stuffed to the gills with my daughter’s possessions. Among the worst 90 or so minutes of my life were those that elapsed from the time I received a text message from my daughter saying that the car was gone (from its parking spot on a residential street in Washington D.C.) to the time when she texted me again to say that her friend and a very kind police officer had found the car (a few blocks away, in another parking spot, to which it had been towed by a city tow-truck driver).
My kid got a parking ticket at a garage where she was told to park when she was teaching swimming lessons at a local pool. Her shift was longer than the 4 hours that was apparently the time limit. She was really sad… asked her boss, and the reply was “oh you need to move your car after 4 hours”. Lol. She would run out between the lessons in her wet suit and swim parka and move the car. She went to the city and made a sad face, and the ticket was dismissed. No one even thought about having some sort of passes for the employees…
Some of this seems so overzealous. It was interesting to overhear local residents at the Parking Authority, complaining about how quick they are to ticket you, put a boot on your car or tow you. I did not want to stand in line for 40 minutes, but I think it was illuminating to do so. I felt less alone In my frustration!
My D2 got a ticket, and got towed, in Baltimore while she was in a class at JHU (that she dropped). She hadn’t seen the sign for no parking between 4:30 - 6:30 PM. She went to court to contest the fact that the towing place had charged her for “storage” when they only had her car for 20 minutes! (a very kind JHU security guy drove her to the impound place).
That experience in Baltimore traffic court was just great. The judge had toy cars and trucks on his desk to illustrate certain rules. He was kind to most people. He dismissed all of D’s charges saying, “I’m going to find you not guilty, not because it’s true, but because it’s the only way to get rid of the unfair storage charge”.
We once got a ticket mailed to our house along with a summons for a day we were not in Seattle. The ticket had our license plate number but was described as a 2012 Mercedes. Our car is a 2009 Nissan. I called the court and got it dismissed.
My friend’s mother got a ticket from the city of Chicago 40 years after she left. She got it the day she was packing to move to Arkansas and just threw it in the garbage. When Arkansas finally upgraded to be included in the national database, Chicago found her and sent it to her, $2 fine and a $50 late fee.
My car, parked in front of my condo in Cambridge, disappeared. I walked up and down the street looking for it then finally reported it stolen. The police located it in an impound lot where it had been towed from a handicapped spot on my street. When I objected that there was no handicapped spot they insisted, so I went outside and found there was a handicapped spot in front of my house. The city had erected the signs that morning…around my parked car…then a patrol car must have come by and had the car towed!
I got back the tow and impound fee and the city cancelled my ticket when I explained what had happened. It was a major inconvenience but it makes for a good story.
DS was ticketed while he was in his car, waiting for his friend. He had taken the guy to pick up a few last things from the apartment he was moving out of. There weren’t any parking spots open, so DS waited in the car while his friend went upstairs. An Atlanta PD car pulled into the parking lot and ticketed him. He offered to drive around the block or otherwise get out of the way, but no, they had to give him a $25 parking ticket. Just mean.
On a happier note, I almost got a ticket outside Sugar Shack in Huntington Beach, but got back to the car just in time. The meter maid said if I would put another quarter in the meter she wouldn’t ticket me, so there we go.
I got a parking ticket in Concord, MA (small town) that’s got meter maids who are monitoring the meters all the time. I didn’t put money in the meter where I parked (for a yoga class) because the snow around the meter was so high I couldn’t get to it. When I returned to my car–I saw the ticket on the windshield. I took a photo of the meter with the snow and anyone could see that it was nearly impossible to get to the meter. I included the photo in my ticket appeal.
I won–no ticket.
I received a parking ticket in Nashville, I parked in the lot and paid my parking by credit card and put the reciept in the car window, the machine would not take my license number after several attempts, I took a photo of my car and surroundings so I could find it again after my concert. When I got back to my car I had a parking ticket for $95 because my license number did not correlate to the ticket in my window.
The only way I won this battle was because my photos were time stamped to correlate with the receipt on my window.
My son with mental illness got a $200 ticket for parking in a handicapped spot at his university. No, he shouldn’t have done it, but this was about the point we realized he was going downhill quickly and needed to be hospitalized again. We wrote a letter explaining all of this to the school, and they never sent us another notice.
Among them: in college I was the totally undeserving recipient of a 68 Mustang, a gift from an eccentric relative. The car was so cool, cops would pull up and offer to buy it.
I ended up selling that car to a young French guy in love with everything vintage American. He was so excited, he didn’t even try to bargain. He bought that car in an instant, ran to the bank, and came back with the cash.
I used the money to go on a 4-month long trip to Asia, leaving shortly after the sale of the Mustang.
Fast forward 4 months, and I’m back in California, being greeted with a pile of maybe a couple dozen warrants for my ARREST.
Turns out, the state did not register the sale of the car (even though I sent in the paperwork) so as far as California was concerned I was the owner of a car that had a couple dozen unpaid tickets in parking-starved San Francisco where my French buyer lived. And after a while every one of these parking tickets turned into an arrest warrant.
At the bottom of the pile of warrants for my arrest was a snippy letter from the City of San Francisco. My car was impounded for unpaid parking tickets and would be auctioned off on a date that had passed by the time I got the letter.
So my poor young Frenchy thought his 68 Mustang was a magic car: you could park it anywhere with impunity! Because he got no letters from the city after the initial parking ticket. And then one day the magic car disappeared…just vanished… and he got no letter about the impounding/auction because the city didn’t realize he was the owner.
So in the end, probably some cop bought my Mustang anyway. At an auction, for a fraction of what the car was worth.
We moved to a different state and hadn’t surrendered our old plates because H didn’t trust mailing them. About 5 months later we got a camera ticket from someone who had run a toll, in a red Acura, and our car was a white Honda. No one checks these things. H still wanted to wait, but then we got another camera ticket and it was for a bus that had run a toll! I mailed the old plates back after that.
We didn’t have to pay those tickets but it was annoying having to prove our innocence.
We were driving from Florida to NY and stopping with the then teens to see a few colleges along the way. We stopped at University of Maryland at College Park, late in the day, and just walked around for maybe 1/2 hour. Apparently, we should have paid at the parking spot, since we got a ticket for being illegally parked.
DH was just telling me a Philadelphia parking ticket story from his bike trip this fall. He and his best friend were sitting at a cafe having lunch and watched a FedEx truck pulll up to deliver a package. Driver disappears into building, cop pulls up and writes ticket. Few minutes after FedEx driver leaves. UPS pulls up. Driver takes package in, cop pulls up and writes ticket.
For some reason, it seems that some delivery drivers will park where they are not allowed (including in the traffic lane) even if a legal easy to get in and out of parking space is right there.
