I hereby pardon all parking enforcement officers
I maintain a tradition of pardoning something each Thanksgiving.
This year, I pardon all parking enforcement officers.
To exercise your empathy, consider watching this 2-hour Parking Wars compilation.
Parking Wars is an American reality television series that aired on the A&E television network from 2008 to 2012. The program followed parking enforcement officers as they engaged in ticketing, "booting", towing and releasing vehicles back to their owners, as part of their parking violation enforcement duties.
From the parking patrol's perspective, our streets teeter on anarchy.
Of course you are not the problem; you are probably a reasonable person. But that parking ticket is never for you -- it is for us. You make honest mistakes, others flagrantly break the law; we are all nails under the Hammer of Justice.
Every overzealous parking patrol grows from systemic failure. If we treat the core problems, we can reduce the frequency/severity of punitive action:
Problem 1: Cars make us powerful
A salmonella outbreak can kill tens of people. An apartment collapse can kill hundreds of people. To prevent such catastrophes, kitchen- and construction-workers are scrutinized against safety codes.
But outside of the workplace, ordinary people only cause accidental mass-destruction in one major venue: the road.
Actually, home fire safety also fits these criteria. In the US, I believe we should regulate/enforce traffic-safety more like fire-safety. Residential fire prevention has clearly been successful; traffic safety is an ongoing failure.
High-speed car infrastructure demands the masses to operate heavy machinery in public spaces. Driving confers freedom/flexibility, but it demands responsible/cooperative actors.
In car-centric societies, parking/traffic enforcement becomes a vital/visible public service. But because driving is the most difficult and dangerous activity for average folk, those folk forever feel antagonized by the forces enforcing safety.
Every driver (and their vehicles) must be individually trained, certified, insured, policed, and inspected. While driving, people must maintain absolute vigil -- lest they risk death for themselves and mass destruction for others.
In car-free cities, such catastrophic caution is simply not expected of citizenry. Mass transit (e.g. trolleys, trains, buses) and human-sized transit (e.g. bicycles) centralize the burden of safety. The onus of dangerous driving is only doled to professionals.
That central burden of safety is eventually automated/mechanized via steel rails, computers, etc.
And so asphalt automatically pits civil citizens against their governments. It also pits citizens against each other.
Problem 2: Parking makes us greedy
My father didn't pay for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody. It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?
— George Costanza
In Cruising for Parking, Dr. Donald Shoup highlights the absurdity of free/cheap street parking:
A surprising amount of traffic isn't caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather it is caused by people who have already arrived. Our streets are congested, in part, by people who have gotten where they want to be but are cruising around looking for a place to park.
As an example, Shoup and his students observed that parking prices around UCLA campus incentivize "cruising" traffic:
Curb parking in metered spaces was only fifty cents an hour during the day and free in the evening, while the cheapest off-street parking was $1 an hour.
Shoup's High Cost of Free Parking should be biblical for urban planners.
In most cities, street parking is severely underpriced. Very vocal local businesses obstruct parking reduction. And so instead of increasing meter prices, municipalities pour money into parking patrols and unsustainable lot construction.
If the math checks out, parking tickets can be cheaper than garages.
In this scenario, everybody is miserable: parking is scarce, customers are deterred, rents are stratospheric, fines are heavy, infrastructure is underfunded, mass transit is impossible, foot traffic is absent, and so on.
Bad prices cause parking conflict. Parking enforcement officers are innocent.
Problem 3: Violence make us miserable
But that's just for immobile vehicles. In the US, people who police moving vehicles have firearms, seizure rights, military surplus, and a panoply of legal immunities.
Food safety inspectors don't carry guns. Parking enforcement officers don't carry guns. OSHA officials don't carry guns. And so on. Bylaw enforcement officers typically don't require serious self-defense tools.
We call US traffic enforcement officers "cops".
The advent of the police car, two-way radio, and telephone in the early 20th century transformed policing into a reactive strategy that focused on responding to calls for service. In the 1920s, led by Berkeley, California police chief August Vollmer, police began to professionalize, adopt new technologies, and place emphasis on training. With this transformation, police command and control became more centralized.
Vollmer pioneered the modern US police force, but he vehemently argued against police traffic enforcement:
Not only does traffic duty reduce the number of policemen available for protection against criminals, but also, traffic violators, who are usually in all other respects law-abiding, are antagonized by censure and arrests for their failure to observe the regulations, and there is thus again created disrespect for law and law-enforcement officials.
Unfortunately, automobiles became popular during the US Alcohol Prohibition era. Bootleggers used cars to smuggle booze and outrun law enforcement. In response, US police usurped control over automobile traffic and quickly eroded Fourth Amendment rights.
For more details on the history of automobiles, 18th & 4th Amendments, and US police, I highly recommend Policing the Open Road and this 99% Invisible interview with the author.
A century later, US traffic/prohibition policing remains a failure. The US has a middling police force but has the highest overdose rates of any nation (10x more than 2nd-place) and harrowing amounts of traffic-related deaths.
Berkeley, CA, is once again innovating policing, by extricating traffic safety from its police force. Under the new plan, BerkDOT officers (not cops) will issue traffic tickets. The best part: infraction data will be used as feedback to improve infrastructure. Traffic violations will be treated like symptoms of bad design rather than motives of bad people.
Yes, parking signs can be revamped.
Build mass-transit. Reduce parking wars. Promote non-violent parking/traffic enforcement. We can recreate Paradise, where scantily-clad men/women refill lapsed parking meters. Thank you for your service, Lovely Rita.
Standing by a parking meter, when I caught a glimpse of Rita
Filling in a ticket in her little white book.
In a cap, she looked much older,
And the bag across her shoulder
Made her look a little like a military man.
Lovely Rita meter maid,
May I inquire discreetly,
When are you free to take some tea with me?