Back when I was renting, these assholes wrote me up for parking in MY spot. It had my apartment number on it, I had proof it was my spot, they still wrote me up. I fought the ticket, and won.
For a while in Calgary, downtown parking fees were so high that it was cheaper to just get parking tickets. Don’t think people didn’t know that! 
(Of course they raised the rates for the tickets, not lowered the parking rates. We still have the dubious honour of having some of the highest parking rates in North America, I believe.)
City of L.A., just north of Culver City. My carport is about five feet lower than the street. One morning I started my motorcycle and was about to leave for work. I got up to the sidewalk and realised I’d forgotten my shades, so I parked it there and went back to my apartment. Two minutes later I returned. The Parking Enforcement guy was backing out of the driveway. Two minutes to see my idling bike, park, get out of his car, write the citation, get back in his car, and start backing out. Bastards!
When I got tired of L.A., I left.
Actually, after you got tired of L.A. you fucking bitched and moaned about it for six or seven years and THEN you left. Get over it for fuck’s sake.
It takes that long to drive out of L.A.
Ha! Silverlake 2005, crashing at a friend’s place. Streetsweeping begins on the side my car is parked on at Time X the night morning, ends around five hours later (five hours later!). I awaken in a panic, having no idea what time it is, but am relieved to find it it’s only Time X + 8 minutes. Sweet, I’ll move my car across the street, then go back to sleep. Fuck me running, you guessed it. Sons of whores managed to ticket me already. I can see them in my mind, sitting there, staring at their watches impatiently, tapping their feet, starving to write a ticket.
I had someone’s car parked in front of my house when it was streetsweeping time a couple of years ago - I went out to talk to the city workers, saying go right ahead and tow that asshole’s car, the signs are up and I’m going to get left with a street full of gravel in front of MY house, not his house, and they told me they couldn’t tow it because they had to get a complaint phoned in by a homeowner or some such shit. Hello! I AM the fucking home owner, and I’m standing right in front of you telling you it isn’t my car, and do whatever you want with it! The bastards left it, and I had to sweep the street in front of my house myself or have three inches of gravel for the rest of summer.
Uh, what were we talking about again?
Zing!
Bwahaha! This afternoon I had to drop my daughter off at our temple for a two-day youth retreat. We were running late so I parked in the neighborhood next door in a spot that was reserved for residents of the neighborhood before 6pm. And it was only 3pm! :eek: My car was illegally parked for at least TEN MINUTES in Los Angeles and I didn’t get a ticket!
I’m livin’ on the edge!
We used to do something similar to this in San Francisco. Go into the city, get a room and it would be something like $25/day to park in the garage. Right below the nightly rate it says Lost Ticket-$40 no exceptions. So, park for 3 or 4 days, leave, tell the guy you lost your ticket and pay $40 for $100 worth of parking. The “no exceptions” part cracked me up. I wonder if that hotel ever figured out why so many people lost their tickets when parking there.
Here in downtown Seattle you can only park for 2 hours. One Saturday I had to work for 4 hours. Came downtown and parked. Here you pay a machine and it gives you a receipt telling you what time your parking is expired. It’s a decal so you use the sticky side to stick it on the curbside window. Mine on this day is good until 2:01pm. At 2pm I head down to plug the meter and a parking officer is in the process of writing me a ticket. I look at the clock on the meter and it says 2:02pm. So I ask her if she is really going to give me a ticket for being one minute late. Her reply is “you know if gives you two free minutes right?” Me: 
I parked my car in Lot B at LAX for a couple of days, and when I came back was greeted not by a parking ticket, but a ticket for not having a front license plate. It is against the law, but I’d driven the car for at least a year like that and never had a problem. I was tempted to claim that I’d taken the plate off and carried it with me for safekeeping, planning to reinstall it upon arriving home. Probably a good thing I just paid it.
Totally agree with the pitting. These kinds of hassles make living in cities more difficult than needed. Suburbia for me.
I love LA. What’s the problem? When my dad was in the hospital a couple years back, I parked behind a DWP truck in a no parking zone. It was clearly marked, but it was also pretty arbitrary (Holy Cross) in that for half of the block parking was allowed, the other half not. The street maintained the same width, there was also a bike lane, it appeared the sign erection was arbitrary.
I asked for a copy of the municipal code-mandated study justifying the erection of the signs, never received it, wrote a couple nasty letters and never heard from them again.
I’m at an event at UCLA this weekend. Parking at UCLA is $10, parking in Westwood is impossible, so I park about a mile out and hike through the Rich People’s Neighborhood. Wide, wide streets with no traffic, all zoned for local parking only. Which means, in practice, the help, because said rich people all have multi-car garages. Mile after mile of empty curbs, because it’s no good to have skanky students (and professors) cluttering up the neighborhood. Don’t tell anyone about my secret spot, though.
My wife is a professor at UCLA so we have the magic blue permit that allow us to park in the reserved faculty spaces in all the structures and lots on campus and in Westwood village. It’s wonderful … .