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Citizen complaint of the day: Abandoned car that hasn't gotten an inspection since 2018, which it failed
By adamg on Mon, 02/13/2023 - 10:05am
A fed-up citizen files a 311 report about a Porsche Cayenne that's been sitting on Creighton Street in Jamaica Plain for months now - with a 2018 rejection sticker.
Stop ticketing this abandoned vehicle and please tow it already!
It's sitting behind a more plebian car that's also been just sitting there for weeks - and shows up in complaints about other issues on the street. Perhaps time to affix a stuffed tiger's head to the top?
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Comments
Free pass
I notice expired stickers on cars every day. When I see the rejected stickers from more than a year ago, and so many of them, I come to the conclusion that that rejection sticker is really a lifetime pass. Once you get that sticker you never need to be concerned about that pesky inspection again. No need to fork over $35 dollars. It's a free pass.
As long as the DOT doesn't enforce the laws about expired stickers, why should drivers comply?
DOT?
Inspections stickers are part of RMV, not DOT, and afaik neither one has cops. Parking cops can and do hand out tickets for expired inspection stickers on parked cars, and cop-cops can and do hand out tickets for expired inspection stickers on cars they've pulled over.
You're correct
I just lumped all of transportation dept. into DOT.
When a traffic enforcement agent (meter maid) puts a ticket on a car, it's merely a $40. ticket.
If a cop pulls you over, it's a moving violation and adds points to your insurance.
The cop also has the right to have the vehicle towed right then and there. Apparently, they don't. If they did, perhaps there wouldn't be so many scofflaws driving around with long expired stickers - in some cases no sticker at all - and we wouldn't see it so rampant.
Call 911
In my experience, calling 911 for an abandoned car gets results. Filing a 311 report is hit or miss.
makes sense
tie up the lines used to real emergency to let authorities know about an abandoned car.. checks out.
Welcome to Boston
I mean, where I grew up (200 miles south of here), it was drilled into our heads that 911 was only for emergencies, but Boston has long said to use 911 for stuff that police might respond to, even if not strictly speaking an emergency (and to call 911 and not your neighborhood police station). I'll go out on a limb and assume that the city has considered the ramifications of something like that and staffed 911 more or less appropriately.
That's not a car
It's a space saver.
You’re correct
I can show you a dozen cars in my neighborhood that haven’t moved since street sweeping ended and the City’s meter maids have done nothing.
Luxury condo with parking
“Quaint and cozy”
Ah, the Porsche Cayenne. The
Ah, the Porsche Cayenne. The Porsche that says "I can't really afford a Porsche".
Hmm..
That was really only true when G1 came out. I think one could've been had in the upper $40s at the time, though it was the slow-as-molasses base one. I mean.. the highest trim available today starts at close to $190K.. and it's very easy to option up any model tier with several tens of thousands of dollars in the blink of an eye.
That one looked really old.
That one looked really old.
You’re thinking of Boxster
Curious, what you think a ‘real’ Porsche is though. Carrera GT? 918 Spyder?
yea...
but i'm a day late on my inspection and i have a ticket. How does this happen?
It probably *is* getting tickets
n/t
At least it’s in a legal spot
At least it’s in a legal spot, which can’t be said about all of the cars left along the opposite side of the street all weekend.
Why shouldn't a car be parked
Why shouldn't a car be parked for 6 weeks? People who create rush hour traffic by driving to work every day aren't somehow better than people who have urgent car trips only occasionally.
The inspection violation is what it is, and they're getting tickets for it. Though it's notable that people with driveways are allowed to have an expired sticker if they're not driving the car for a while, since there's no law against letting it expire if it's not parked or driven on a public road.
Universal Snub
Open comment regarding what gets posted in replies department:
Some of my replies to stories get posted, many more don't.
I read many of the comments and see a lot of vitriolic banter between participants.
I try to keep my comments on topic and not spiteful, certainly not towards other readers.
Just wondering if being snubbed is more common than not. Not just about my own replies but others? I cannot know who else is snubbed because only they know if it happened or not.
I enjoy the stories here on U-Hub. It is my internet Home Page. Just feel like it's becoming Universal Snub sometimes.
When this doesn't get posted, I'll understand.
Winter time parking
Not to apologize for a car that appears to not have been on the road for 5 years.
Just it is fairly common in years with more snow for cars to not move for several months when the street is covered in snow.
People shouldn't be punished for walking and taking transit
I mostly use my car for road trips. Keeping a car for very occasional use is still way easier and cheaper than renting a car. People who aren't into skiing might not take any road trips all winter.
Owning a car costs many
Owning a car costs many hundreds of dollars per year whether you use it or not. How is that cheaper than renting a car a few times per year?
There's a reason why people
There's a reason why people keep cars for infrequent use.
Insurance is about $500 a year. It would be less if I dropped comprehensive and collision. And even less if I dropped liability to the minimum $20k/$40k, but I consider that immoral.
Excise is about $40. Inspection is $35. Registration is $30 per year. Maintenance is very minimal when you don't drive a lot.
There's also the amortized cost of buying/replacing the car, but that's currently $400/year for me, and dropping each year the car lasts.
It's really easy to blow through that much on a single car rental, especially if it's a holiday weekend or a longer trip. There's also the time spent picking up and dropping off the rental, and the inflexibility of sticking to the booking. (Plans changed and you get home at 10 pm? Sorry, can't go to sleep yet, you still have to return the car unless you want to pay a big late fee.) You often have to go to the airport unless you want to pay even more.
Note that if you don't own a car, you won't have your own liability policy (credit cards just provide for collision). So you only get the state minimum liability through the rental company, or maybe in some other states you don't even get that, and you have to pay a whole lot if you want to add liability on the rental.
People have proposed charging for insurance by the mile. This would tip the balance even further towards owning a car for infrequent use rather than renting. It would also discourage using the car for unnecessary trips because the fixed cost of insurance had already been paid, which I think is a great thing.
10 years ago
Someone with a BMW parked in front of our house in Cambridgeport and then put one of those obnoxious car covers over the car and just left it there. It wasn't anyone on the street but someone looking to store their car for winter. Which was mostly just annoying until the French Toast Alert meter went to 5/red/severe and the car disappeared.
Good riddance, right? The storm came, we shoveled out all the cars (great way to meet the neighbors) and a couple of days later, the Beamer showed right back up in the nicely-shoveled space with the tarp back over it. Evidently, it had been placed in a garage during the storm, but the driver was happy to have someone else dig a space out for him.
A sign was put up on the adjacent street pole that said something like "If you didn't shovel out this spot you shouldn't park in it, maybe you should get a garage spot" with the implicit threat that if you wanted to store your beamer in a space someone else shoveled, you ought to expect it might not be great shape when you came back. If it hadn't moved the next day we wee going to shovel every last bit of snow on the street on top of the car, and maybe spray some water on that snow on a cold night to fully encase it. But the driver got the message and was gone.
Other story while I'm here … a couple of years later in January 2015, there was a car with Kansas plates and a visitor permit which had been parked on the street for months. Eventually it got booted and right as the first storm was coming I called the City to see if it could get towed. "Well, the boot has only been on for six days, and it's not up for a tow until tomorrow," the parking clerk said. I countered: "have you seen the weather forecast for tomorrow?" and she said she'd see what they could do.
As the snow was coming down, at 10 p.m., a truck showed up and the car was towed off. It showed up a few weeks later … with Massachusetts plates and a resident sticker!
That’s the thing about living
That’s the thing about living on a public street: it can get used by the public.
If you want to be able to tell your neighbors to get their car off the street in front of your house, move to a gated community.
The point...
I think the point is that this isn't a neighbor.
Where’d you get that?
Because the vehicle has been parked for 6 weeks? Nowhere does the complaint say anything about it being or not being a neighbor’s vehicle.
It's a pretty common thing, though
It's a pretty common thing, though: people find a parking space, not in their neighborhood, and that becomes their garage. I'm guessing this might be the case here, because it's obviously not resident parking - you can't see that resident sticker through a car cover, so...
It wasn't a next-door
It wasn't a next-door neighbor that they knew, but presumably it was someone from the neighborhood. Why would someone from outside Cambridgeport leave a car there? Presumably the license plates were visible and the meter maids would be ticketing it if it didn't have a Cambridge sticker.
And wherever they lived, it
And wherever they lived, it was close enough that they noticed the vigilante public-street-appropriating note within a day.
I have to ask
Did the Beamer at least have a resident sticker?
a couple of days later, the
bimma.
You don't own street so
You don't own street so anyone from anywhere can park wherever....f.u
Boston could care less
The city does not care about abandoned cars. There's literally 4 cars taking up space on my street and a bunch of 311 reports to go with them. Each car only has one license plate but none have inspection stickers. They're all filled with car parts. We've reported the cars as abandoned and illegally parked but the reports are always closed a couple days later like clock work and no one shows up to ticket or anything.
Oman
You sound like you're from rozzie...
Snitch!
Snitch!