Parking Lot Patrol Is Cheating
- Posted December 18, 2007 at 12:08 am
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I guess many of you have received a parking ticket sometime in you life penalizing you for exceeding the time limit. Have you wondered how they actually check which car has violated the rules? Do you really think they would actually write down your sign-in time, license plate number, and the spot number when you park your car?
What happened?
Two days ago, I parked my car in the parking lot at the shopping plaza where I go to work. During the day, I kept moving my car to different spots every 2 hours or so to avoid violating the 3 hours limit rule. At the end of the day, when I got back to my car, I realized a ticket was sticked on my windshield. It said I have violated the 3 hours limit. I was in shock.
The Evil Act
The next day, I saw a patrol in the parking lot holding a long stick and walking around the parking lot. I was curious about what he was doing so I observed him for a while. I finally found out how they check on the cars. On one end of the long stick, there was a chalk. The patrol was marking the tires of every car in the parking lot. Three hours later, the patrol came back and gave a violation ticket to those cars that had a chalk mark on their tire. It didn’t matter whether the car had left the parking lot during the 3 hours or moved to a different spot. The patrol would just think that your car stayed at the same spot for over 3 hours. This is outrageous! This is cheating!
So if someone wants to park in the same spot for more than 3 hours without getting penalized, he can simply erase the chalk mark on the tire before the patrol comes back. If I don’t like you, I can just mark on your tire and you will automatically get a ticket. The 3 hour limit is rubbish! For a shopping mall, this kind of patrolling will just force the shoppers away.
Thanks God
Fortunately, the mall management is willing to write off the ticket for me. But I still think the way the patrol uses to check on the cars is inappropriate and not following the procedures set out by his company. This patrol should be fired and money should be credited back to the innocents.
By the way, the evil patrol is patroller number 70 from the Imperial Parking Canada Corporation.
Living where I do we don’t have need of such things as parking lot time limits so I can’t really say I have ever thought about this particular thing. I have to admit though that this certainly does sound like cheating. Glad you didn’t have to pay the ticket.
Finally, I have one person on my side. Thanks.
Dig the blog a LOT!
Nice style and I like the way you discuss the problems . I’m going to book mark it.
Thanks for your tip. I will start digging!
The thing with putting a chalk mark on tires has been used for parking enforcement at least since I was a child. And it sounds as though you Were violating the three hour rule, unless it said somewhere that it was waived if you move the car to a different space.
Maybe I was violating the three hour rule, I will check on that tomorrow to see if it says anything about moving to a different space. However, this kind of enforcement has a lot of problem and I think it should be abandoned. What if I didn’t know about the chalk mark and it stayed on the tire for another day? Am I going to get another ticket because of the chalk mark stayed there? If the parking lot allow me to pay for parking, I am willing to pay so that I know I am not violating anything. Unfortunately, that’s not a choice.
Oh! Perfect job!
Very good and helpful post.
Thx, your blog in my Google reader now
We’ll expect many new interesting posts from you