i don’t have any advice on the issue at hand, but i do hope that apricot was joking. i know, from bitter experience, that if you pay the court something, it ain’t coming back!
Demand a trial by jury. It’ll just waste $25 or more of your dollars, but it will gum up the works and it will make at least someone at the court house laugh.
Note: I actually reccomend you just pay the fine. You ran a risk, you failed to make out in a positive fashion by doing so, and you’ll simply increase your own losses by not paying this fine in a timely fashion.
I used to park in Boston a lot, and had a number of interesting adventures with meters and tickets.
A basic problem is that those of us who park our cars tend to think of the rules principally as a way to control parking and keep things running smoothly. Being a few minutes overtime obviously causes no real problem, so why should it cost 20 bucks?
Those who enforce the rules tend to think of them principally as a way to raise money. Failing to write a $20 ticket for 5 minutes overtime is like failing to cash in a $20 lottery ticket – just plain stupid.
I did a lot better when I assumed that money was the motive.
Leaveing a couple minutes late may not gum up the works too much, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If you say “it’s okay to be a few minutes late”, what do you do when someone comes by and says “But I was only a few minutes later than a few minutes late!”?
Wow, Jonathan Woodall, your use of “gum up the works” has subconsciously slipped into my brain and now it is trying to get our through my posts. Gee thanks! =)
[more hijacking]When I read that, I thought, “I have a cousin who married a Dickerson!” However, I looked up her address and it turns out hers is “DickerMAN.” But I digress…[/more hijacking]
On topic, I think it was a good idea to investigate whether the meter was functioning correctly, but I agree you shouldn’t spend more than $20 of your time dealing with this.
And how do the parking meter people know you’re 5 minutes over and not 2 hours?
Every parking meter I’ve seen for the last 5 years has had an LED display. I wonder if the cities could program the meters to count backwards at expiration such that the meter-maids (meter-butlers?) could give a little leniency. Sure, there are abuses and so forth, but just a thought.
Balthisar: That’s nothing! In Tokyo, back in the early 1990s, the parking meters there had electric eyes so the thing could start timing you from the moment you pulled in. If you noticed the meter reader coming up, say, 10 minutes later and then plopped your yen into the meter, you were also paying for the time you already used. And if that’s not bad enough, as soon as you drove out of the space, the meter automatically went back to zero so nobody else could get the benefit of your remaining paid time. Apparently, the concept the Tokyo government was using was paying “for one hour or portion thereof.” Also, if you weren’t back to your vehicle before time ran out, the meter’s top light started flashing so the meter reader knew which vehicle to come ticket.
In prime areas, they may check a lot more often than every couple of hours. One pass tells them when meters are due to expire, and thus when would be a good time to come back ready to write that ticket.
In Boston they seemed to be pretty good at setting the meter max time limits somewhat under the typical duration of an errand. If a visit to City Hall typically lasts an hour, expect the meters to have a 50-minute maximum.
Diabolical schemes are becoming feasible. How about a meter that can sense when a car moves (or fails to) and summons a ticket-writer just as time expires?