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City councilor would ban towing on street cleaning days
By adamg on Sat, 04/04/2009 - 9:55am
South Boston's Bill Linehan would instead increase tickets to $100.
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Comments
How would they get the
How would they get the needles out of the gutters in Southie then?
Misses the point
The point of towing cars isn't to punish their owners for being forgetful. The point of towing cars is to get the damn cars out of the way so the Pelicans can get through and do their jobs!
At no time is this more important than the first scrub of the year, when things have been building up for months and months.
A heavy fine does not mean clean streets - it means that privileged whiners can go get their tickets fixed.
Oh, pish-posh!
This is ludicrous! How the hell are they supposed to get the streets cleaned...anywhere, if they don't tow?
Good idea
First, let's not hear from anyone who doesn't live in the City of Boston on this.
The $100 ticket is sufficient penalty and sufficent motivation to move your car.
I disagree, deselby.
First of all, this forum's open to anybody who wishes to express his or her opinion on any thread that's posted here, including this one, whether they reside in the City of Boston or not.
Secondly, just giving out $100.00 tickets instead of towing isn't sufficient. The effect(s) of such a policy would snowball quite rapidly; once somebody parks in an area that's designated to be street-cleaned on a given day of the month and finds that they just get a ticket instead of being towed, they're more likely to treat the parking ticket as just something that can be fixed or paid and that's that, and keep on doing what they're doing. Then, the next thing you know, everybody wants to pull this kind of a stunt, and the streets wouldn't get cleaned. Towing the car of somebody who's failed to read the sign(s) and parked in a designated zone for street-sweeping that day is the best way to get the street(s) cleaned, plus getting towed and having to trudge over to the other side of town and pay a hefty amount in cash that combines both the towing fee and the ticket is a royal pain in the neck that nobody in his/her right mind would want to go through for a second time.
If you lived in the city, you'd know . . . .
that they often tow or ticket and then don't sweep the streets. A detail in this debate lost to our suburbanites.
And if you WORK in the city ...
I've honestly never seen the city NOT clean a street after towing it out in the morning. That isn't because I live outside the city now, but because I tend to bike to work or from home or North Station or Cambridge. I actually notice when they tow because I get an extra wide street. I then notice that the street is clean in the evening. It seems far more common that they do not tow and just clean around ticketed vehicles - not entirely great, but certainly helpful. You don't have to live in Boston proper ... you just have to spend much of every day in the city and spend time out on the streets themselves.
I will admit that I am only familiar with places that I've lived or worked in - Charlestown, fenway/Kenmore, back bay, mgh/downtown, and Longwood. The cleaning after towing may vary by neighborhood, possibly by towing company?
As for "blah blah blah you don't live here blah blah blah", listen up: those of us who commute in (from distances that would be well within city limits in most "major" cities, mind you) could certainly take our businesses out of the city and spend our lunch and shopping money somewhere else and leave you to happily wallow in the resulting neo-Detroit if it would spare you the difficulty of having to think about a regional economy. Otherwise, those of us who grace your exalted minuscule fiefdom with more than a third of our lives and contribute tax income and commerce to the city have something to say about the quality of life and the conditions that we all have to move around in.
Yeah, a C-note a week is totally reasonable.
I always ask myself, "Self, we could go move our car or just pay the city $100 today. Maybe we could even waste time off of our busy schedule to go downtown to argue that we had a good reason to leave it where it was instead of just moving it. Whaddya think? Just eat the ticket today?"
Get real. $100 is less than the cost of the tow and current ticket combined. It would be less of a problem for someone who does forget than to have to go pick up their car from the tow lot. It reduces the city's liability by not having to take possession of the person's car.
About the only thing a ticket but not a tow would do differently is remove the car for the cleaner to come by. Then again, nobody is going to rack up 2 $100 tickets in a row, so it'll get cleaned next week just the same. There are places in the city where they have no posted street cleaning hours and yet they still sweep occasionally and the streets do fine there even though there are plenty of cars for them to weave around.
Isn't that the point of towing?
Towing immediately gets the car out of the way of the cleaner.
Ticketing possibly reduces the likelihood that the car will block the cleaner in the future.
Cleaned next week?
"...it'll get cleaned next week just the same."
In my neighborhood the street cleaning is on opposite sides of the street on alternate weeks - one side gets cleaned 1st & 3rd Monday of the month, other side on 2nd and 4th Mondays. (When there are five Mondays in a month the whole street gets to wallow in its filth.) So a car illegally parked on street cleaning day means that it'll be 4 weeks till that patch gets swept.
I truly wish there *were* towing before street cleaning around here - all they ever do is ticket, and plenty of folks seem to regard the fine as a parking fee they're willing to pay from time to time.
If it ain't broke don't let the tow companies profit from it
It's pretty damn simple.
- The streets always got cleaned before they started towing. It's not like the spot that was missed 2 weeks ago will be missed the next time... And it's never really been a problem.
- Maybe a good solution for the whiners that want to see people get towed for forgetting to move their car on street cleaning day would be to tow the first sweep of the year and ticket people for the remainder of the season.
- The city gets $40 and the tow companies get $112... That ain't right. Why should tow companies profit from something that ain't right to begin with. It's a huge hassle to wake up to a towed car... The victim has to be late for work, locate the vehicle, find a way to get to the car, come up with $112 + $20 per day stored (not everyone can come up with the money quickly), this has a huge negative impact for our economy... Except for the shady tow company.
- Who knows who? I'd like to find out why Boston thought it would be a great idea to allow tow companies to profit from towing cars on street cleaning day... Twice a month, every month!!!!