I have a question regarding my girlfriends car getting towed from a public street. The tabs are good and it was legally parked near our house when someone reported in abandoned and it was towed without contacting her at all. The car was not being driven regularly. The owner (my GF) was never contacted at all. Do we have to pay to get it out of impound or does the tow company need to bring it back here before we sue?
Tacoma Wa, if that matters
Some municipalities have rules concerning how long you may leave a car parked on a public street without driving it, licensed or not. For instance, San Jose says:
Looks like Tacomaconsiders it abandoned after a week.
From past experience, a city will tag the car, wait a day or two, then tow the car. They will not try to find the owner.
Wow. I’m surprised it’s that short of a time period. Luckily, my neighbors seem to know my car, as I’ve been out of the country for three weeks at a time and never have gotten it reported. I just looked up the Chicago law and it states seven consecutive days and that it is “apparently deserted.”
Moderator Action
Since this involves legal issues and maybe a potential lawsuit, it is best suited for our legal advice and opinion forum.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Yeah most places consider cars parked in the same place for usually somewhere between 2-7 days to be abandoned, but in practice they never actually do anything unless someone complains or if it’s an area with lots of predatory tow trucks.
If they’re nice, they’ll put some sort of note on the car a few days before they tow it. They may also just put chalk marks on the tires to see if it’s moved or not (you get a really nasty note if you erase the marks or jack your obviously non-running car up to move them. Or so I’ve heard…) Sometimes though, they’ll just drive by and eyeball it, so there’s no real indication they’ve got you in your sights until the tow truck shows up. It sucks, but you usually don’t really have a whole lot of recourse since, yeah, according to the letter of the parking rules it’s an abandoned vehicle.
Particularly for the Chicago crowd:
RIP, Steve Goodman.
72 hours here, and IANAL but ignorance of the law is not an excuse so unfortunately your girlfriend will probably have to suck it up and pay the impound and towing fees.
7 days in Chicago. They won’t tow a car that looks like it’s in working order but they will happily slap an expensive ticket on it. It is all about the money.
Tacoma, WA resident here, and every time I’ve seen an obviously abandoned vehicle (no plates, packed full of garbage) they put a notice on the windshield (usually painting a date and id# in large letters on the passenger side as well) several days before it was eventually towed away.
Get it out asap! Towing companies charge ridiculous rates for storage of impounded vehicles ($30 per day, when I wrecked my car a few years back).
Your girlfriend should be ashamed to be an American. She is not burning up gasoline or polluting the planet fast enough.
Ug, thanks for the info guys, We already paid to get it out (my lawyer responded mentioning that even if we got it out we could still get the money back) She just got a new car because the Towed one is a rancid piece of shit that cost us over 2k this summer and still keeps breaking down. That is also why she hasn’t been driving it. Looks like one of our neighbors must have called it in because it was parked in front of their house is my guess. The street parking here is always a mess as far as its park where you can.
Who has the burden of proof respecting the question of whether the 1/10 mile was satisfied?
And what do people do if they don’t have off-street parking where they live? You’d go over three days any time you had the flu, if nothing else.
You gird your loins, take a Dayquil and go move your car, or pay the ticket (it takes a few tickets around these parts before you get booted or towed, but they’ll slap the first ticket on your car within 48 hours if it hasn’t moved). Or you ask a friend or neighbor to move your car. It’s sucky, but parking is in such short supply the city has the upper hand.
That’s pretty much it. I was a traffic officer for a bit and had to deal with these complaints. Way too many cars parked on the roads to be able to notice if any fall into the abandoned category. The ones that did were for the following (off the top of my head) reasons:
[ol]
[li]Citizen complaints. “There’s an abandoned car in front of my house.”[/li][li]Obvious signs of abandonment. (covered in leaves, flat tires etc)[/li][li]Not moved and still parked after a snow storm. All streets must be clear for snow removal, town ordinance. [/li][li] Automatic plate reader hits and says the vehicle isn’t registered.[/li][/ol]
Mostly it was #1. If we had reason to believe the vehicle was abandoned we would leave a bright orange sticker on the window warning that it needed to be moved within 48 hours or be towed. If it was still there we would tow and ticket.
If a car was in the same spot and I happened to notice it for some reason other than what was mentioned above I would do nothing about it.
That’s about two city blocks in the US. I think the idea is that you can’t move it by driving it around the block and reparking it in the same spot. You have to move it to a new spot that is at least two blocks away.
The city where I used to live didn’t have metered parking downtown; instead, there was a two hour limit once you had been parked in a space for two hours, you had to repark on a “non-adjacent block,” which means two blocks away, or about 1/10th of a mile. The residential areas adjacent to the downtown area are permit-only, and residents get the permits for free, plus a couple of visitor permits, but there is some kind of 48hr. rule for the visitor permits that uses the same language “non-adjacent block,” which is kind of a silly rule for someone visiting a friend who lives close to downtown, but the language and the distance is obviously some standard, and it’s apparently not just a local standard.
Two blocks is probably somebody’s idea of how much people are not willing to go out and push a non-running car every couple of days (if you just had to move it to another spot on the same block, people would push it), but not so far that it’s too far to walk if you have to give up a choice spot right in front of your house. The time period probably recognized that some people might legitimately not go anywhere over the weekend.
Really depends on the city. Here (and in many other places), that’s a block or less. (Chicago is 8 city blocks to the mile, and a lot of cities are 10 to the mile.)
At any rate, as I said above, it also must depend on the neighborhood and your neighbors. I’ve left my car parked for three or more weeks without moving it without issue several times. As long as your neighbors recognize your car, it’s not an issue here. There are also multipe times a year where me or my wife go over 7 days without moving our cars, as well. Seems like in Chicago the “apparently deserted” part is the important one. Looks like it might be different in Tacoma.
So as long as someone’s living in it, it’s fine…