The Great Parking Ticket Boom : Citations Are Harder Than Ever to Avoid; How to Understand--if Not Appreciate--Yours

Sometimes it seems like getting a parking ticket in Los Angeles is easier than getting a sunburn.

Whether your windshield has been decorated with the traditional $13 meter violation or the more esoteric $28 alley violation, most likely you’re 100% guilty as charged.

But don’t take it personally. You’ve merely been caught in what might some day be called the Great Parking Ticket Boom of the 1980s.

Last year, according to the number-keepers at the Los Angeles Transportation Department, the City of Los Angeles wrote 3.2 million parking tickets, twice as many as it did in 1982.

Los Angeles issues more parking tickets than any city in the state (San Francisco wrote 2.3 million last year), but other local cities aren’t suffering from writer’s block. Beverly Hills, probably the world leader in parking tickets written per square mile of area, wrote about 350,000 last year. Santa Monica wrote 300,000, Pasadena 107,000.

More Tickets Than Vehicles

Add another 1.5 million or so tickets that were written by smaller municipalities throughout L.A. County, and the total of parking tickets flying around the county--by no means a complete total--approaches 6 million. That’s more parking tickets than cars and trucks (5.6 million) registered in L.A. County.

This dramatic increase is no accident.

Traditionally, urban parking enforcement has been a low-priority concern of police departments, as it was in Los Angeles until mid-1985. That’s when parking responsibilities were transferred from the LAPD to specialists at the city’s Department of Transportation.

The consolidation and streamlining of public parking operations that has occurred in Los Angeles is part of a national trend, according to Kevin Hagerty, an assistant parking director for San Francisco, a city whose soon-to-be-consolidated parking system he described as bureaucratized, inefficient and suffering from “bad management.”

Three-Day Trade Show

The public parking industry is not just booming. It’s also going professional. Membership is growing in the Institutional & Municipal Parking Congress, which publishes a slick monthly trade magazine, Parking Professional. And the California Public Parking Assn., of which Hagerty is a past president, recently held a three-day trade show in Anaheim that included computerized parking ticket writers, solar-powered parking meters and meters that accept credit cards.

Unfortunately, even professionals haven’t found a way to stretch the 12,000 miles of curbs in Los Angeles to create more parking spaces. As anyone knows who’s tooled around L.A. for more than a few days, it’s virtually impossible to not commit a parking violation on occasion--especially in such busy areas as downtown L.A., Hollywood and Westwood, where off-street parking is costly and on-street parking is in great demand.

Not uncoincidentally, those are the top three areas for meter violations, according to Robert Yates, the parking administrator for the L.A. Department of Transportation. Yates carries around in his head a wealth of statistical information about parking, and what he doesn’t know is available from a desk-side computer terminal in his office behind Union Station. According to Yates’ projections, for example, about 4 million cars in the City of Los Angeles will have the dreaded but familiar pink and yellow ticket tucked snugly under their windshield wipers this year.

With help from Yates and others, it’s possible to put the lone parking ticket on your windshield into context, as well as to explain how various parts of the complex, city-county-state parking ticket system works--or doesn’t work.

For starters, your parking ticket was probably written by a specialist, one of the city’s 450 traffic officers who drive around in compact white Pontiac 1000s and write 94% of all parking tickets. Another 100 traffic officers will be hired soon, said Yates, who considers parking enforcement just “one tool in managing the competing interests of traffic, parking and transportation.”

Quotas Denied

In addition to being trained in directing traffic and impounding vehicles, these parking police patrol the streets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, writing an average of 50 tickets per day. Some, Yates said, write as many as 150 a day. But there’s absolutely no basis, he said, for the common suspicion that traffic officers have parking ticket quotas.

The yellow side of each ticket includes your car’s description and license plate number. The information on the ticket is entered into the computers of Datacom, a data processing company owned by Lockheed that handles parking tickets for Los Angeles, Santa Monica and other cities, including Boston and Dallas.

The most commonly committed violation on L.A. streets is the generic No Parking. Of 3.2 million parking tickets in 1987, about 997,000 were for No Parking (at $28 each). About 25%, Yates said, occurred during street cleaning times.

The No. 2 infraction in 1987 was for Meter Violations, with 834,800 $13 tickets generated by the city’s 35,000 parking meters, which Yates said swallowed about $14 million in change last year. (After certain expenses, Yates said, the meter money goes into a parking fund used for new parking facilities.)

No Stopping: Now $53

No. 3 is for No Stopping in a curb lane, which Yates said is issued 34,000 times a month. In a get-tough effort to deter rush-hour lane-blockers downtown and on heavily traveled streets such as Olympic Boulevard, the city has recently upped the fine for No Stopping to $53, measures which Yates said have improved traffic flow considerably.

Despite the popular perception that no one ever receives a ticket for parking illegally in a handicapped parking space, Yates said that 9,000 cars were given the $53 fine in 1987, the least common of the pre-printed violations on the ticket.

The “Other” category, if you’re interested, can include such transgressions as parking in intersections, parking across driveways or sidewalks, obstructing an excavation site, blocking fire zones and double parking.

On the pink side of the ticket is all the information you need to know to pay your ticket as easily and promptly as possible, which, let’s face it, is what the Department of Transportation hopes all parking violators will do without much kicking and screaming.

(Parking revenue collected in 1986, the first full year of the new system, soared to $49 million from 1985’s figure of $20 million. In 1987, $65 million was collected in parking ticket revenues. The city keeps 92 cents of each dollar and gives the rest to L.A. Municipal Court.)

Still, according to Yates, only 65% of all tickets issued in the city are actually paid. That’s up from about 50% in the late 1970s, when the LAPD wrote the tickets, but it still means that about 1.4 million of the nearly 4 million tickets that will be written in 1988 will never be paid.

Of the tickets that are paid, however, almost half arrive within a few days by mail in the handy envelope/ticket, or are paid at three Parking Violations Bureau walk-in locations. Yates called this “windshield payment.”

Within 30 days, all of the less-cooperative offenders are mailed a Notice of Delinquent Parking Violation by the Parking Violations Bureau. (Datacom first takes the license plate number of the violator and gets the registered owner’s name and address from Department of Motor Vehicle computers in Sacramento.)

This “courtesy notice,” as some call the blue-inked letter that asks for payment of the original fine (bail) within 10 days, is mandated by state law. It’s designed to protect motorists in the event they don’t know they’ve gotten tickets because they either blew off the windshield or were removed. About 45% of those receiving this notice pay up, Yates said.

If the ticket is still not paid, Datacom notifies the DMV in Sacramento. The original fine is doubled and the unpaid parking fine is added to the car owner’s next registration renewal fee. The DMV will not renew the owner’s registration unless all tickets are paid off or have been dismissed by a court.

Cracks in the System

The DMV’s hold on car registrations is designed, at least in theory, to capture all those tickets not paid at local levels. DMV figures show that it collected about $39 million on the 3.8 million tickets it added to vehicle registrations statewide from February of 1987 to February of 1988.

However, there are some sizable cracks in the system that account for some of the 35% of parking tickets in Los Angeles and the 46% of tickets in San Francisco that are never paid. Many cars are simply never re-registered. Kevin Hagerty said one California Highway Patrol estimate is that there are about 800,000 unregistered cars on the road statewide. Any outstanding tickets on them can’t be collected unless the car is “captured,” as was the case March 3 when the city’s Dept. of Transportation got its “Most Wanted” car, a 1983 Mazda with 201 unpaid tickets worth $11,598. (The car, which had a stolen 1988 renewal sticker on its license plates, was impounded and sold for far less than that figure, however. The driver, who would not have been arrested anyway, according to Yates, disappeared while the car was being towed.)

Likewise, if a car is sold by its owner before it is re-registered, Yates said, the fines rot in the system. The new owner of the car is not responsible for the old tickets. Nor can the old tickets be transferred to a second car registered to the original offender.

Out-of-State Drivers

Yates said state laws are being proposed to close these and other loopholes, but other important sources of never-paid tickets include out-of-state drivers (some municipalities like Los Angeles track down their names and addresses and mail them “courtesy letters” but if they are ignored, as most are, there is nothing that can be done).

Rental cars and the more numerous fleet or company cars also account for many unpaid parking tickets. Although some states are beginning to hold rental companies responsible for all or part of parking ticket fees, in California rental agencies are not liable for tickets received by their customers.

Yates explained that by law rental agencies must provide the ticket-getting driver’s name and address, but if John Doe of Des Moines or even Downey ignores the city’s “courtesy letter” asking for payment, there is no recourse.

“Thousands,” was Yates’ estimate of the number of tickets racked up by rental cars. He had no precise numbers, but estimated that the major agencies have about 75,000 cars in the Los Angeles area and that every one had at least one ticket. He put the dollar amount owed at “at least $3 million.”

A woman who answered the phone at a major rental company office near LAX said one of her jobs was to open and forward “the stacks of parking ticket notices” she got in the mail every day. Some days, she said, she gets a hundred or more.

Most of the unpaid tickets, however, said Yates, belong to “habitual violators” who “are out there constantly violating.” He estimated that they owe $28 million of the $140 million total in unpaid tickets, much of which he said are “bad debts” that can never be collected. As of last September, he said, 5,900 vehicles had 16 to 20 unpaid tickets.

Recorded Message

If you don’t want to join the ranks of civic deadbeats but don’t agree that you deserve the ticket--or simply want more information--you can call one of the two numbers listed on the pink side of the ticket. A recorded message greets about 2,000 callers a day, then puts them on hold, where they might listen to radio station KJOI anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes before one of eight operators becomes available.

The top three reasons violators contest tickets, according to a supervisor of the Parking Violation Bureau, are: 1) parking signs were missing, conflicting or blocked by trees, trucks, etc.; 2) the ticketed car had been stolen; 3) the parking meter was broken.

The violations bureau, which is staffed by Datacom employees, will temporarily suspend tickets and check out a contesting caller’s claims. According to Yates, tickets are dismissed if the complaints are found to be valid. If they are invalid, or if there is no way to make a clear determination, the PVB tells the caller to pay the bail ( fine and bail are interchangable) and make a court date.

The bureau schedules about 100 dates per day (morning or afternoon sessions) at municipal courts in Van Nuys, West L.A. and downtown L.A. As of Wednesday, the next available court date was not until Aug. 5.

Success Not Likely

Your odds if you do contest your ticket? Last year, about 28,000 parking violators had their days in court, according to figures kept by L.A. Municipal Court. About 80% lost. In other words, only about 5,600 tickets of the 3-plus million parking tickets issued in 1987 were eventually dismissed by judges.

Win or lose, the only extra cost incurred by going to court is the lost time--it can be a whole morning or afternoon. A Los Feliz man in line at the Parking Violations Bureau office on Sixth Street said recently that when he showed up for his court date there were 500 other people there. He gave up the fight to prove that he had already paid some of the tickets the DMV said he owed when a court official said they probably would not all be taken care of that day.

The Parking Violations Bureau also gets 2,000 letters a day, the supervisor said, mostly asking the same questions as phone calls. “Quite often,” he said, the letters are “nasty” and there have been even been bomb threats. The nasty letters are kept in a file; the extremely nasty ones are brought to the attention of management.

The all-capitalized warning on your ticket about the possibility of your “motor vehicle” being subject to “seizure” is meant to sound a little scary, but no one’s car will be ever be impounded for failure to pay just one parking ticket, Yates said.

Denver Boot in L.A.

Arrest warrants may not be issued for unpaid parking tickets, but parking enforcers still have the trusty tow truck and the newly deployed front-wheel-locking device called the Denver Boot.

Thanks to Section 22651 of the state Vehicle Code, cars with more than 5 unpaid parking tickets--”boot eligible” vehicles--can now be impounded by city authorities until all of the tickets are paid.

Booting details descend upon neighborhoods armed with a computer print-out called the “Hot Book.” It contains the license plate numbers of 63,000 boot-eligible vehicles whose owners owe about $58 million (they’re called “habitual offenders” in the 10-minute videocassette Yates produced to explain how his enforcement system works).

According to Yates’ figures, the city’s 10-man Booting Division seized 7,700 parked vehicles in the last 11 months; 4,600 were released on the street when past-due tickets were paid off and 3,100 were towed away and impounded.

A Visible Deterrent

The booting program, Yates said, has been a success in terms of both revenue generated and as a visible deterrent to potential violators.

“I realize people think we’re just out there to issue tickets,” he said. “But there’s a purpose behind it. We’re out there in the morning and evening to coordinate traffic and deploy traffic officers for special events and signal the electronic news media whenever there’s a problem. It’s a full-service thing.

“The booting, the peak-hour towing, the DMV, it’s making a difference. We’re doing a better job of managing the system. We really see a difference in traffic mobility.”

“I realize that the ticket is what gets a lot of attention, because everybody sees it. It’s very visible. It’s not something anybody enjoys getting. . . .”

Yates, who noted that the rate of increase in parking tickets will not be as high in the future, said he’s never gotten a parking ticket himself.