SECOND OPINIONS : Tale of Parking Citations and a Double Standard : One vehicle is parked for half an hour in an alley while unloading furniture, and is ticketed. Another is left blocking a lane for two months, and isn’t.

I received a parking citation one recent Saturday night. My husband and I had moved some furniture, and the rental truck was in the alley behind our house. The citation was for parking in an alley.

When we got the citation we were surprised. We have lived in this house for almost four years and have parked in our alley numerous times, as have our neighbors. The citation only listed a Municipal Code section, so we had no idea what we had done wrong.

On the Monday after getting the citation, during my lunch hour I drove to the library to make a copy of the Municipal Code section. It stated that you cannot park in an alley unless loading or unloading. Period. Did you know that? We sure didn’t, although we never made it a habit to leave one of our cars out there--not because it is illegal, but because it is stupid. You’d wake up in the morning with no tires, no parts, probably no car.

Anyway, since we had been using the alley to unload furniture from a rented truck, I decided to write to the city Parking Enforcement Division advising that the truck was in the alley for the purpose of unloading, and asking--hopefully--that the ticket be dismissed.

But I got to thinking. This ticket seemed a bit ridiculous. First of all, we had been parked in the alley for only about 30 minutes, and to unload the furniture. At the time, a total of 12 other vehicles were parked in the three blocks of alleyway that can be eyeballed from my garage door. Those vehicles had been there all day and into the night, but not one of them (and I looked at each as we drove by that night) had been cited along with us.

To add insult to injury, we were about to take the truck back to the rental agency when I discovered the officer, smiling as he shoved the ticket onto the truck’s windshield.

I guess I must have had a startled look on my face. I was not expecting to run into anyone in the alleyway at 9:30 at night, and definitely not expecting a parking ticket.

The parking cop got very defensive when I questioned him. He kept saying over and over, “You left it with no activity, you left it with no activity,” and then drove away. At that point I wondered: What law had I broken? The inactivity law? Watch out, all you couch potatoes!

And then I remembered an incident that took place a couple of years ago, when someone abandoned a car in front of our house. The car sat there for two full months, and I’m not talking about some little side street--we live on a main Valley thoroughfare--two lanes in each direction. Not only that, but the curb is painted red in front of our house.

Everyone on our block called every agency we could locate to complain about the car, since it was an eyesore and a traffic hazard. When my husband made his sixth call in two months, he spoke with an LAPD officer who said there was nothing the police could do and that he should call a special hotline for abandoned vehicles. (That hotline, by the way, was the number we had called the previous five times, and our neighbors had been calling it too.) My husband was frustrated and blurted out, “If I set it on fire and push it out into the middle of the street, will you remove it then?”

The car was towed away the next day. We don’t know by whom.

The point I’m making is that the city is quick to ticket for obscure parking violations but very slow to perform services, even when the two are so closely related.

A rental truck that was used to move furniture is parked behind a home for 30 minutes and is ticketed (the citation indicated that the truck had been there for a whopping 33 minutes), yet an abandoned vehicle is left in a red zone, blocking half a lane of traffic, collecting debris, creating an eyesore and a traffic hazard, for 60 days, even though multiple complaints had been called in over the two-month period.

Go figure.