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Earlier this week, the City Council passed a bill to add a five-minute grace period for drivers in certain no parking zones, such as alternate side parking regulations and expired Muni-Meters. Amid debate about the bill's worthiness, Mayor Bloomberg vowed to veto the legislation, saying "The five-minute grace period is only going to lead to chaos and enormous increases in the number of contested tickets, and in argument. Whose watch are you going to use?" Well, based on one Daily News reporter's experience, maybe it doesn't matter at all!
Reporter Kate Nocera parked her "battered Honda Civic" in six different locations across the city: "My first stop was Atlantic Ave. in downtown Brooklyn, where I imagined ticket agents would swoop down like pigeons on a discarded sandwich. My muni-meter expired at 1:48. It wasn't until an hour later that I got a ticket. Dumb luck, I thought - until it kept happening."
Indeed—Nocera managed to escape without tickets for 30 minutes to an hour in Bushwick and downtown Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Only the traffic enforcement agent in the Bronx ticketed her 4 minutes after the Muni-Meter expired. She decided after this assignment, "I'm going to be extra vigilant about feeding meters and switching sides. After this run of luck, I'm pretty sure my parking karma has totally run out."
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Bull.
Like pedophiles who know the exact second school lets the kids out, ticket agents know when a car's time is almost up. They look around, check how much time is left and come around later to write the ticket.
jesus, could you come up with a more unfortunate simile next time? have you had experience with that or something?
Both of these subhumans just exist to try and screw me.
So what's next, a five hit grace period for smoking pot?
Let's hope so.
i have 2 tickets sitting on my desk waiting to get paid both written at 8 am exactly and each time my cell phone said 750 something i am all for the 5 min grace period
Challenge them. Doing it by mail is easy enough. Say that it wasn't 8:00 yet.
OR, go in person and you get a "preliminary hearing" - before you sit down with a parking judge some random person offers you a discount to just settle and walk away.
So basically the point of this story is that ticket agents are not, in fact, omniscient, and they can't be everywhere at once. Wow.
The last time I intentionally parked in a non-legit spot was in Manhattan, for about a half-hour, and I got away with it. (I was one of those areas that opens up at 6:00 and it was like 4:30. Other people were doing it too which seemed like a good sign.) In my own neighborhood in Brooklyn, however, I would never. We are definitely over-patrolled.
"who's watch you gonna use?"
What an idiot. This is a problem and has been a problem as long as timed parking has existed.
Whether on time or five minutes late, what time will be used as a reference remains the crux of the issue.