I understand the frustration with dealing with a bureaucracy and the hoops to jump through to get you car back, especially when it is the city’s mistake and the response is, “I can’t do anything about it.” but that is rare. What we usually see is:
I’m parking illegally but I have an excuse. Usually the excuse is that it would be inconvienent to park legally.
I’m parking illegally, but that parking law is stupid.
You shouldn’t boot a car for $X in parking tickets. The fact that the person ignored the parking tickets is apparently immaterial.
So how much of Parking Wars is people playing for the camera and how much is people being clueless about breaking the law?
Pretty much all those shows (Parking, Repo, other “people getting reallly mad” types) are kayfabed as much as any pro wrestling event. Somewhere in the fine print you’ll see “recreations” or “dramatizations” or “based on actual events”.
I think I watched Parking Wars a few times and it’s not fake like Operation Repo (awful, awful show, akin to pro-wrestling).
However, the biggest thing I gathered from it is how most of the time the parking offenses are nothing more than entrapment. It’s well known that speed traps are as much about generating revenue as they are about safety, but this show was simply ridiculous. Nobody’s going to die or get injured from someone parking illegally for a few minutes. And they literally created situations which essentially forced honest people to park wrong, hid behind the corner, and then just started filling their quota of parking tickets (bureaucrat with the most probably gets a set of steak knives).
The ones in Britain where they lay in wait and actually repossess (i.e. boot) your car just for parking illegally for a few seconds, causing a huge fine and inconvenience, well, let’s just say it’s a good thing handguns are illegal there!
It is a fascinating, alien world to me, living in the back boonies. I don’t think we boot cars around here, and I am fervently hoping I never have to park in a big city. Too many rules.
I’ve paid a few parking tickets of my own over the years. Most of the time, I’ve paid within the proper time frame to get the lower fine. During some of the financially tough times, I’ve let some go until I had to go in to avoid impound.
Two things: 1) Most times, it was going over meter time (happened a lot when I was on the road in sales) or 2) I wasn’t paying attention to signs when I parked. Every one was a rightous ticket.
When I had to go to the PD or traffic court to pay, there were people there who acted just like some of the people on Parking Wars. They were the ones who got totally bent out of shape, cursed (the traffic court judge didn’t take too kindly to that), got loud and generally acted like an ass.
I think a good share of the reactions are legit, although there are likely some of them playing to the camera.
I worked in a parking office back in college for a few years…
Some pay their tickets knowing what they did wrong. 50-60% appeal and get denied. Some whine, some don’t. “I was only parked for 5 minutes” is common. Basically excuses. They know they are not allowed to park there.
Are parking enforcers overzealous a-holes and is the bureaucracy a mess? That’s a different debate, but people truly getting screwed over by the system is pretty rare, but it does happen.
What I find interesting is when one episode they’ll say “I can’t reverse the ticket, I already started writing it.” And then in the next episode, they’ll just void the ticket, even if it’s already printed out. Because they actually can.
I think that gets to the crux of the matter; people argue and/or plead about parking tickets at least in part because they know that it’s discretionary (to a certain extent).
And of course they don’t bother showing the majority of people who don’t argue and/or plead, as eman77 notes.
