The Parking Cop Is An Idiot? Or Did He Give Me A Break?

Common Sense Personal Finance


Yesterday, I awoke to find a parking ticket on my car. In San Francisco, the city have street cleanings on different days for different streets. Even if you are a resident, you can not park your car on the street when the street cleaners come around. Anyways, Wednesday, I came home late, and there was very little street parking left. I found a spot, and I thought I had lucked out. It didn't occur to me that people weren't parking there because there was street cleaning the following day on Thursday.

When I went to my car on Thursday, I saw the ticket. Man, was my wife going to be pissed. Anyways, I tucked the ticket away, and didn't look at it it till later. It was then that I realized that he got the license plate wrong. It was off by one letter. If the license plate is wrong, then that's not my car that got the ticket. They are just going to look up that license plate number and send the ticket to Joe Schmoe out there with a license plate that is one off from mine. Joe Schmoe will send a response back contesting the ticket. And I would get off Scott Free.

But what if the the partking police did a cross reference search against my vehicle ID number on ticket? Wouldn't they be able to find my car? In San Francisco, in order to get a parking permit, you have to basically register your car with the Department of Parking and Traffic. They don't call it an registry. They just call it a parking permit application, but we all know they use that to keep track of all the cars in San Francisco by license plate numbers and vehicle ID numbers. You're not required to get a parking permit, but if you want to park in the street, you should get a parking permit to avoid gettting tickets. Most streets in San Francisco have these 2 hours parking limitations unless you have a parkign permit. Many people in San Francisco have these parking permits, and so the Department of Parking and Traffic have a registry of vehicle ID, license plate, and owners.

In other words, they can look up my car with the vehicle ID number on the ticket and find me. I was thinking that parking cop was such an idiot because he got my license plate wrong. And I was thinking, maybe I should just pay the ticket because they can track me down with my vehicle ID number. It was then that I looked at my parking ticket and I see that for the vehicle ID number, he had put "Can Not Be Read." And I knew at that moment, that he let me go with a wink and a nod. My vehicle ID number was clearly readable, but because he purposefully left out the vehicle ID number and purposefully mistyped the license plate number, the owner of the vehicle (me) is not traceable.


What does the parking cop cares anyways? He still gets in his daily quota of tickets. And he just says that it was an honest mistake. No one is the wiser.