Opinion: Surprise: Red flag law works

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Last Saturday, I walked the dog through my Hollywood Hills neighborhood and saw something totally unprecedented: not a single parked car anywhere. I live on one of those narrow canyon roads where the houses are pretty small, and though most have garages, many people use them as storage closets for their excess crud, so the street is usually jammed with parked cars. The reason for their strange absence was a city ordinance passed last year that at first I thought was a silly example of government intrusiveness; now I’m a believer.

L.A.’s red flag ordinance bans street parking in neighborhoods at high fire risk when the Fire Department issues a red flag warning -- typically hot, dry days when the Santa Ana winds are blowing (you can sign up for email notices of red flag days on the Fire Department’s website). Though the law has been in place since last December and signs started going up a year ago, it wasn’t until Saturday (a red flag day) that parking officers started plastering cars in my neighborhood with warning notices saying they’d be towed if they weren’t moved by 10 a.m. No one could have been more surprised than I was when this actually worked.

The law has its problems. So many cars routinely park in L.A.’s hillside neighborhoods that it would take every tow truck in America to tow them all away. Some houses don’t have garages, or their garages are too small for all their owners’ cars. Meanwhile, thousands of day workers come to these neighborhoods for construction or cleaning work, and they have to park somewhere. This ordinance gives them no alternative but to break the law, and encouraging people to be scofflaws isn’t great public policy.

And yet... on Saturday, I walked the dog past the home of a neighbor who was busy rearranging extra furniture and packing assorted junk into boxes. ‘Those red flag notices finally motivated me to clean out the garage,’ he said. The fact that parking officers made a rare appearance in the neighborhood convinced even people who normally have no qualms about breaking traffic laws to get off the street. Big stretches of curb that I had assumed were white because there had always been cars parked in front of them turned out to be red.

I’m still skeptical about the red flag law. It was so successful mainly because of those windshield notices; I doubt parking officials will be able to plaster them over every affected neighborhood in the city on every red flag day. And it helped that this one was a Saturday, when there were few day workers in the area. When people figure out that there’s little real danger of being towed, they’ll be more inclined to ignore the warnings. But for all that, anything that encourages people to use their garages for their intended purpose, while making the streets safer for drivers and easier to access by fire trucks, is more than OK with me.