Besides being a jerk, is there anything to prevent me from parking in an Expecting Mothers or Electric Car space? Can I get ticketed/towed if I park my normal car while not being pregnant in those slots?
I understand parking in a handicapped spot or fire lane is a legal no-no, is that the same for other types of reserved slots?
They could have your car towed. That would be more likely in the electric spots rather than the Moms to be ones. You can see a guy hasn’t or can’t plug his car in. Whereas even a guy hopping out of his car may be picking up or dropping off his pregnant wife.
I’ll expand on this. Your car gets keyed. Light vandalism. Nasty remarks. Listen, I have been a pregnant woman. I do not say this lightly (and I am only mostly kidding) you do not want to mess around with a pregnant woman. I do not think that I would have keyed your car, but I might have parked behind you, blocking you in, while I went into the store and raised holy hell. Because pregnant women do not want to be messed with. Or I might have blocked you in, and gone inside and cried, I mean literally cried, bawled, to the manager. It’s all good. Being pregnant is super awesome I might add. Please don’t be a less than nice person and do this hypothetical thing.
The store may have the right to have your car towed for non-compliance with their posted parking signs. Or the county/city/state may have actually added code that mandates pregnant spots (like the disabled spots and veterans spots) and you’re gonna get towed but for a different reason.
The best possible outcome is you get out of there with nothing but a dirty look. Why bother? Just park in a regular spot. Yes, the one that’s farther away. And walk in.
Yep. And not just from pregnant women. Husbands are pretty vindictive too.
Yeah, it is dumb in one respect to have them in the first place, but I can assure you- When the woman in question has a two, a one, and another on the way, they will shop at that particular store for the convenience. If it is taken by someone who clearly is not pregnant- I am looking at you, single males- bad things happen.
Yes, I was ticketed once in a private parking lot for parking along a yellow curb. (It had been snowing and you couldn’t see the curb was yellow and there were no signs; I fought the ticket and won.) However, I have never heard of a law that allows only a certain class of people to park in a spot, except for those with handicap permits.
I do not know if commercial businesses open to the public can request police enforcement of arbitrary parking rules, but I doubt it.
Universities certainly can; pretty much every college/university I’ve ever been to in the U.S. has its own parking rules with spaces designated for students, faculty, visitors, service vehicles, etc. You park in the wrong spot, you get ticketed or towed, and a number of universities will turn unpaid tickets over to collection agencies if they can’t identify a student account to bill.
Interesting coincidence: I came to this thread to mention something that happened when I was doing IT consulting work at Vanderbilt quite some while ago. A woman who was pregnant decided that her condition should allow her to park in handicapped spaces (this was a very long time before the notion of “Expecting Mothers” parking had occurred to anyone). She consistently parked in such spots, and consistently had her car towed because of this - yielding far more stress, hassle and strife than if she could have accepted the rules as written. I had to admire her persistence, if not her good sense.
To answer the OP’s question: Probably not much beyond hostility, as others have suggested. Most (all?) such spots are in private lots, and exist principally to create goodwill by encouraging & catering to pregnant women’s sense of entitlement.