A public road has no parking signs along the side. You park your vehicle there and leave it. Come back later, you have a ticket. No surprise there.
Now, is it “parking” if you are there in the car? Are near the car? Does the engine running make a difference?
If you are “right” there with the vehicle so to speak, does the LEO have to give you the option to quit parking there and leave before he/she writes a ticket, or can they write one right then and there before doing so?
Interested in Florida and Alabama if we have to get specific.
Now, of course the logical person in me says hell yeah its “parking”. I am more interested in the legal analysis.
Oh, this is not a fire lane or something like that, just simple no parking on a country road in the middle of nowhere.
I can only provide anecdotal evidence. I definitely cannot provide facts regarding Florida or Alabama.
I wrote parking tickets for the city of Williamsport PA in the early 80s.
It made no difference if you were in the car or if the motor were running; if the car was in an illegal spot, you were parked and we wrote a ticket. If you *were *in the car, we always gave you the option to leave, but we did not *have *to.
Often someone would go around the block, thinking that since we had the whole city to patrol, we would be elsewhere by the time they got back. If I caught a person in the same spot twice, I wrote a ticket. Even if they drove off, the ticket would be written.
At least one person challenged his ticket based on the following:
[ol]
[li]He was in the car[/li][li]The car was running[/li][li]He drove off before I finished[/li][/ol]
He lost his case. The district magistrate ruled that he was parked because the car wasn’t moving and he ruled that driving away before I finished writing a ticket did not exempt him from the law.
I had heard that the same person (a lawyer) challenged the ruling the next level up, but by that time I was in college and did not attend the hearing, nor could I verify if it even went through the courts; therefore I cannot say what happened.
I looked at those regs, and interestingly enough, they don’t tell me the other, and probably more important thing I need to know. Which is, how FAR away do you need to be from a no parking sign to not get a ticket. They have distances for all kinds of other parking stuff, even somewhat vague stuff, but nothing specifically for no parking signs. Of course there is the possibility I missed it, misread it, or misinterpreted it.
Depends on your location. In NY, they have the useful distinction of
NO STOPPING - that means no stopping for any reason other than traffic flow / lights.
NO STANDING - you can stop briefly to let someone off, but cannot sit there waiting with the engine on
NO PARKING - you can stop or sit there with the engine on, but you cannot turn off the engine or leave the car if you’re a driver, and have to move the car if it is creating an obstacle
Although this only refers to those sort of signs, the situation may be different with regards to things like firezones and intersections.
On a military base I was given a Parking ticket for idleing in a loading zone, I fought it and won as I was in the car with the engine running at the time and the MP would not listen that I was going to be loading something as soon as it was brought out.
Many years ago I was visiting in New York and I pulled over to the right lane to consult the map behind some other cars which were stopped. A few seconds later, when I looked up from the map, the car in front of me had moved on and there was a woman writing me a ticket for “parking” illegally. And NYC had the gall to write me to my address in Spain (which is the one I supplied) demanding I pay the ticket plus some penalties. I had the immense pleasure of writing back telling them to go and take a long walk off a short pier. Or try come and get me in Madrid if they could. (That was then. I suppose these days my name would be on the no-fly list and on the most wanted terrorists list.)