City Council candidate hates bike lanes so much she parked in one, screw bicyclists, but it didn't end well for her

Cathy Vitale, who hopes to improve next year on her dead-last finish in the 2023 at-large council race, decided to park in the Tremont Street bike lane along the Common Friday night, then refused to move when a cop asked her to - and when he went to write her a parking ticket he discovered she had a suspended license.

And can you imagine, the cop wouldn't give her the "grace" to let her drive back home to Dorchester if she promised not to drive again until she got the whole license thing settled with the Registry, so instead she had to wait for a pal to come by and drive her car to Dorchester. She claims she was unaware her license had been suspended over $90 in unpaid tolls, but that's just the sort of thing government does to poor people like her, she harrumphs, and now she has a $90 parking ticket on top of that.

Vitale, who always videos what she thinks are important happenings in her life, says she refused to move because she had nowhere else to park while waiting to pick up a friend from the Common, so of course she pulled into the bike lane, the bicyclists could just go up on the sidewalk if they needed to and besides, bike lanes just suck (ed. note: Even before the city installed a bike lane on the Common side of Tremont, she wouldn't have been able to park there legally, because it was a vehicle travel lane).

If you don't recall Vitale from her low-wattage 2023 campaign, perhaps you'll remember her as one of the Covid bucket bangers who would stand outside Mayor Wu's house early in the morning screaming at Wu's kids their mother was going to prison.

Then she joined a lawsuit over the city's brief vaccination requirement for indoor spaces and lost when the judge said she didn't prove a Regina Pizzeria actually refused to serve her when before she left in a huff when she refused to show proof of vaccination and the place called police.

Last year, she finished behind even fellow Covid-19 bellower Shawn Nelson among the eight candidates running for one of the four at-large council seats. So you don't have to worry about her pulling an Althea Garrison and getting on the council for a year should incumbent Erin Murphy win her race for that court clerk's job she's now enamored of.

Note: The link at the top of this story contains excerpts from Vitale's account. If you want to see the whole thing, start with her video of her interaction with the cop, then listen to her update (which is technically a video, but she did it in the back seat of her car, without lights).