Driving I-65, I-465, I-69, and various other interstates in the great Hoosier state, one often espies cars apparently abandoned on the shoulder. These decrepit vehicles usually sport one or more bright orange stickers: rectangles that seem to be about 6" x 3", the long side usually perpendicular to the ground.
I have never pulled over to see what the stickers say and thus have the following questions:
What do they say? (“We are going to tow your car within 15 days unless you come to claim it,” etc.)
Are these stickers put out by Indiana alone, or are they used by several states? Are they all alike, or are they variations on a theme?
What is the policy for handling abandoned cars in Indiana and elsewhere?
Are these stickers only for use on interstate freeways, or are they used elsewhere? I can’t recall any car similarly dealt with on a state road.
We have at least one Wisconsin Officer here that can give better insight then I can, but I was always under the impression that the orange sticker basically meant “Yeah, we know about this car, don’t call us”
Often times I see a car with an orange sticker and someone still sitting in it.
Massachusetts has something similar but I don’t remember the color. I assume that there is some type of date on it as well to tow it but I have never looked that closely.
I’m confused about this phenomenon. In Canada (here’s a link for Ontario, for example), there are charity car donation services that tow your abandoned car for free for the purposes of recycling. They’ll even pay you cash, if the car is still worth something. Why would people just leave their cars in the road if there was a chance they could get money for them? Does the service not exist in certain states, or are the towing costs that much higher?
When it happens here in the UK, it’s often because someone other than the rightful owner left the car there - i.e. it was stolen and abandoned when it ran out of fuel or something. The cars appear by the roadside, stay there for a day or two before the ‘police aware’ sticker gets slapped on, whereupon people seem to consider them a free buffet for spare parts and they get stripped to a shell in a matter of days. Then someone sets them on fire.
Here in Tennessee, they have a multi-step process. First group comes by and slaps a green sticker on. A few days later or so they slap an orange sticker on. If it’s not gone a few days after that, wave bye-bye.
In college, a friend’s car broke down miles from his apartment, so he walked home. Later he got a ride back to the car with the parts he needed to get it running again. So sometimes it’s simply that the owner is broke, but does not intend to abandon the vehicle.
The bigger question is why the cars have been abandoned in the first place, and not promptly towed by the owner to the nearest mechanic. Or are a significant portion of them stolen and abandoned by the thieves?
Lack of funds. There’s a lot of cars running around out there which are close to mechanical failure. If the owner hasn’t the funds to fix the vehicle, he/she doesn’t have the funds to have it towed, either.
To the OP: Mississippi has these stickers too; I think ours are orange as well.
I’ve heard rumours that scrappies look for cars like this, the price of scrap iron having gone up due to demand from China. Owners of old cars feared being charged for having them legally disposed of, but now they’re being taken for no fee at all. True?
We seem to have something like that here in Jersey. I always see a fancy tri-color tag hanging on cars. The tag appears to be made of three different sheets of paper, each different colors. They are different lengths, so by looking at the front you can see the ends of all three.
I have always assumed that a cop passes by and rips off the top tag after a day or so, and then a few days later the second tag goes, and then the car leaves.
Perhaps Loach, our resident NJ cop, can explain this?
If Indiana is anything like California, it probably puts a higher priority on vehicles near a freeway than any old back road. A car that is close to the pavement can cause a serious disruption in traffic patterns and a ripple effect in heavy traffic.
I had a car that broke down on the CA freeway once in the left shoulder lane, and (this was before celphones) and a friend just happened by and gave me a ride to a mechanic’s. When I got back, it had a police sticker on it, but of course I got it towed within hours of the breakdown. I doubt if they would have left it there for more than 4 hours and would have towed it immediately if it was blocking the roadway.
A few years ago I had a flat at a friend’s house, changed the tire, got on the road to go home, and the spare went flat. I took all the stuff out of my car, took the tire, got a ride from a buddy, got the tire fixed the next day and came back to the car. It had an orange sticker on it telling me it better be gone in either 24 or 48 hours, I forget.
I know a while back there were some very high publicity cases of bodies being found in trunks of cars abandoned for weeks or months. I assumed the sticker meant “Okay, we’re gonna tow it, and we’re gonna make sure you didn’t kill anybody and leave it here.” It was one of those stickers that’s a pain in the ass to take off, too.
We have the orange stickers here in Maryland, too. A while ago I saw one slapped on the side of a POD that had been parked in front of someones house for a few weeeks. I have no idea how the police were planning on towing it.