After living in Los Angeles for two weeks, I’ve discovered the awful parking ticket problems that plague drivers and car owners all over the city. <\/p>\n

Upon arrival at a possible parking spot, you are greeted by any of the following: A parking meter, a sidewalk with red paint or no paint, and a pole or post with up to twelve different signs. The red paint means you absolutely cannot park there, and it is the only concrete law of parking in this city you can actually trust. If you park in a zone bordered by red, you will definitely get a ticket or towed or both, and you deserve it. If there is no red stripe, you’re out of luck, because the most confusing 30 minutes of your life is about to make you hate all of California.<\/p>\n

The parking signs usually have different messages– “No Parking”, “No Stopping”, “No Parking Any Time”, and they seem to contradict each other; while one message tells you “No Parking”, the other says “No parking between 6am and 10am Monday-Friday” and the third says “1 Hour Parking Only — Permits Excepted” and the forth says “No Parking Monday 8am-10am”. The order will change, and the text size will change, and the days the signs are relevant will come and go, but the most obnoxious and unnecessary of parking rules relates to street cleaning.<\/p>\n

Kill Me Now<\/h2>\n

This utterly pointless exercise occurs when a large truck with a brush on the bottom drives down the road and spits out an extremely small amount of water out on the ground as it passes. This effectively “cleans” the road, since there is no rain to speak of, and throws it up into the air for us to breathe. While this is happening, whatever side of the road the truck is “cleaning” must be free of parked vehicles, or else you are issued– I kid you not– a $73.00 ticket<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Besides the obvious, which I’ll address in a minute, I’ll talk about what this means for anyone who parks on the street: Those poor souls who either live in an apartment complex that doesn’t offer resident parking, or who are too poor to afford it, must park their vehicle on the street every single day. While some people will tell you otherwise, cars are absolutely necessary to go to work, shopping, protests, and the courthouse to pay parking tickets. If someone owns a car in the city, it is most likely a requirement for their life. So now the people who dare to own cars in Los Angeles must scramble out of bed to move their car, which they somehow found a spot for the night before, out of the way of the meter maid before she arrives ahead of the street sweeper<\/em> and starts handing out tickets like lawsuits at a clown car festival. The worst part is they don’t even follow their own rules<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why Not Just Round Up to a Billion<\/h2>\n

Those tickets, which are $73.00, by the way, punish you for owning a car and having the outrageous need to park it in the way of the lame, city-mandated broom-mobile. Then, after you take 3 hours off work to go pay your ticket, you get home late to find that the only parking available is on the other side of the street, which is scheduled to be cleaned the next morning, so RISE AND SHINE, IDIOT! WHY DO YOU STILL HAVE A CAR?<\/em><\/p>\n

In case no one has caught on, this is 100% a money grab by the city. It’s well-documented<\/a> that no one in government can agree on whether to make the prices unreasonably high or ridiculously high, and it has to do with whether or not LA has enough money to buy the Pacific Ocean, apparently. I’ve seen this in cities with a high commuter population, and the sole purpose is to drive money out of people who already pay high taxes on cars and living and into the government coffers so they can lease golf carts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let’s Be Honest<\/h2>\n

Look, I’ve been living here for two weeks, and I already see a problem. I’m doing what I can to make everyone’s lives easier. I got rid of one of my cars, so we are now a single-car family, and I leave for work in the other one at 8:00AM, which is the limit before any street-sweeper-interference tickets are issued. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t hundreds of people a day getting SEVENTY-THREE-DOLLAR tickets for a two-hour windows of parked cars that interfere with practically nothing who literally can’t afford to pay them by people who don’t know what they’re doing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, dear L.A., please fix your street cleaning problems before everyone leaves. Thanks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After living in Los Angeles for two weeks, I’ve discovered the awful parking ticket problems that plague drivers and car owners all over the city.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The street cleaning racket in #LosAngeles is out of hand","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[908],"tags":[1478,1479,965,1480,1481,1482,1483],"class_list":["post-1898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journal","tag-car-owners","tag-drivers","tag-los-angeles","tag-money-grab","tag-parking-tickets","tag-street-cleaning","tag-street-parking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n