The great street-cleaning lie
IF IT WERE any other two-hour window during the week, I would have happily pledged my soul to the patron saint of Los Angeles street parking. A few Friday mornings ago on my block, hundreds of feet of gorgeous curbside concrete were exposed to the street, none of it red. Alas, I may as well have been stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific -- not an inch of this prime real estate was available for automobiles.
“No Parking. 10 a.m. to 12 noon. Friday. Street Cleaning.” A simple, staccato set of instructions visibly erected several times over on my stretch of Harvard Boulevard in Hollywood. Most residents of my crowded neighborhood grudgingly comply and move their cars well before 10 a.m., either on the way to work or because they have already determined that 10 a.m. really means, well, 10 a.m.
It does. In December, having just moved to Hollywood from more suburban Glendale, where residential street parking is an afterthought, I tested an 8 a.m. street-cleaning parking restriction on Franklin Avenue (translation: I slept in). I made it to my car no more than 10 minutes after the hour, and to this day I recall the exact time stamped on my first city of Los Angeles parking citation -- 8:07 a.m. Damn, these guys are good.
After accepting that housewarming gift, a doubt began to gnaw at my mind: Is the city actually cleaning its streets with the same ferocity it issues parking tickets for those who obstruct street sweepers?
To get to the bottom of it, I staked out my block Friday morning, March 3, during the two-hour no-parking window. As expected, just a few ticks past 10 a.m. a white parking enforcement Honda hybrid turned from Hollywood Boulevard onto Harvard Boulevard and slowed to a predatory crawl. By 10:15 a.m., the driver had slapped $45 tickets on three parked cars. The street sweeper? Never came.
If you think the scofflaws are therefore entitled to a refund, think again. In Los Angeles, as in most other crowded cities, parking violations have become a reliable stream of municipal revenue. For the current fiscal year, about $113 million -- almost 2% of the city budget -- will come from parking ticket fines (and we’re supposed to believe transportation officials when they say parking enforcement officers don’t have quotas).
It’s understandable that the city would want to pocket some cash on the backs of residents who routinely thumb their noses at its laws. But much of the housing in my neighborhood is high density -- buildings with small apartments or studios that don’t have driveways or garages. So strictly enforcing a street-cleaning zone is easy pickings for the city. But when the sweeper never comes, the city may as well be stealing hard-earned cash from residents who mostly live paycheck to paycheck.
Thankfully, a state senator from -- of all places -- the rural Central Valley has taken up our urban cause. Sen. Michael Machado (D-Linden) introduced a bill in February that would force cities to cancel contested parking tickets if they can’t prove that a street was, in fact, cleaned on the date of the violation.
It’s a common-sense idea, really. If the government effectively commandeers an already parkingchoked block and fines those who don’t comply, it should at least hold up its end of the bargain.
I’ll start thinking about a “Machado for Governor” exploratory committee once he muscles his bill out of a Senate committee. For me, though, Marcus Vaughter -- a man I’ve never met -- embodies my frustration at receiving a ticket the morning after driving laps around my neighborhood late the night before on a desperate parking safari.
About 20 years ago, Vaughter decided he had been penalized by one street cleaning too many, so he strolled into a Santa Monica police station and unabashedly announced that he had smashed a brick into the windshields of four parkingenforcement scooters.
Perhaps Vaughter should move to my block in Hollywood. A few of us on Harvard might even throw him a ticker-tape parade.
Paul Thornton
