[dangrossman]

It's easy to avoid being ticketed by an incompetent/corrupt parking authority by simply not living in the city they're employed in. You can even keep that up for millennia! That doesn't mean they never give out unjust tickets to the people that do live there.

[stinkytaco]

It's also easy to chalk up thousands of perfectly legitimate parking tickets to a few incompetent/corrupt parking authorities that you have no evidence exist except anecdotal experiences.

I’ve now read a half a dozen comments in this thread that I can sum up as "I once got a parking ticket that I shouldn't have, all parking authorities are incompetent and corrupt." No one's telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to challenge a ticket or to address the issue with your locally elected official.

[dangrossman]

> No one's telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to challenge a ticket

I think that's exactly what the person I responded to was saying. If obeying the law never results in being issued a ticket, there's no reason they should allow tickets to be challenged.

[stinkytaco]

I'm not sure where you get that at all. I really see no one anywhere saying anything like that.

The starter of this thread is clearly being tongue in cheek.

The next person was addressing that by arguing that corruption causes people to get unnecessary parking tickets.

The next one was saying that he was overstating that because he himself had managed to avoid that (side note: so have I).

I don't think: "you should not be allowed any redress on parking tickets" was ever broached.

What I take out of this is that there are bad parking tickets and there is a system for dealing with bad parking tickets. No system is perfect, all systems have compromises, design flaws and humans who make real mistakes implementing them.

Accepting this I personally feel revenue from parking tickets is an excellent way to keep taxes lower. I happen to see this process in action as part of my employment, so perhaps I am biased. I have also seen places who basically feel the way you do about parking enforcement and I do not like it (I’m looking at New York here). I will take the tradeoffs and if I choose not to, I will address the problems with my elected officials whose job it is to oversee the budget process to avoid exactly the kinds of corruption we’re speculating exists.

[dangrossman]

> corruption we’re speculating exists

We're not speculating. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. Last summer our traffic courts were permanently closed, their cases turned over to the municipal court system. 9 of the traffic court judges, and 3 other city officials, were indicted on criminal charges related to fraud and corruption.

[stinkytaco]

Good, I'm sure they should be indicted.

But that does not indict all parking tickets everywhere or the system of issuing parking tickets. It indicts a suburb of Philadelphia.

It's like saying that when a sports official gets a call wrong (or even worse, is corrupt), it indicts every team that's ever played that sport and the very act of playing that sport.

[dangrossman]

If that's what I had tried to imply, you'd have a point. Instead, I'm arguing with someone who says there's no evidence of corruption but a few anecdotes, by providing an example proving otherwise. That was the city of Philadelphia for the record, not just the suburb I live in. Big court, millions of citizens, state legislature had to step in to stop the corruption. And it's not the only ticketing authority in the nation with bonafide, verifiable corruption. You're spreading misinformation by repeatedly making that assertion that it's all speculation.

> It's not like they are walking into your driveway and giving you a ticket.

Yeah, they actually do that too [Google: 19,600 results for ticket "parked in my own driveway", and personal experience]. You're either overtly biased by your employment where you're taking part in this revenue, or you're wholly ignorant of what it's like to park regularly in some of the largest cities in this nation. Either way, your commentary is uninformed.