Urban Chupacabras

Urban Chupacabras: How Your Parking Ticket & Meter Money Is Sponsoring Parking Enforcement & Self-Serving Officials.

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For starters, let’s give the local government the benefit of the doubt and pretend like they are not wasting the money we pay on parking tickets or for parking meters. Let’s pretend for a moment, they are spending it on some projects we could benefit from.

If the Department of Transportation and the Bureau of Street Services or any other city agency would spend the money parking enforcement collects on paving our roads, we probably would have no potholes, and the roads would be nice and smooth like in Germany, Holland or Orange County at least (!).  However, this is not the case. 

Our freeways and major thoroughfares like Fairfax Ave or Highland leading to Oscar ceremony (!) are full of cracks and potholes and keep deteriorating. Instead of repaving them, we see construction crews being busy needlessly working on some residential surface streets that no one ever heard of endlessly repaving them even though they are underused and are not in a bad condition to begin with. 

Maybe the city of Los Angeles spends money from meters and parking tickets on planting shade trees along our streets to cool off the sidewalks and make it more pleasant for pedestrians. Or maybe the city should build new transient free parks? 

Not really! 

What about moving the homeless from the city into rural areas outside the city into “permanent psychiatric care” facilities to clean up Los Angeles once and for all?  This would be the only viable solution to homelessness – instead of wasting billions of dollars on building shelters inside residential areas and high-density urban environments which only makes the presence of the homeless thugs a permanent menace and permanent nuisance for all of us.  No, the city council doesn’t even have the intention of doing that – they want us to live side by side with the disgusting zombie drug addict thuggish crowd permanently.

Oh, we know where our parking ticket money and meter money should go! Hire more police officers and tough on crime District attorneys!  For that, perhaps, we’d be willing to “pitch in”!  They are not interested in doing such a thing either.

What they are interested in doing is improving working conditions and compensation for the city bureaucracy and for parking enforcement chupacabras!  

Two careers are probably competing for the number one hated career spot: divorce lawyers and parking enforcement officers.  Not all of us, fortunately, have to be involved in an ugly divorce and intensely hate the other side’s lawyer, but all of us who drive have to face parking enforcement and pay for meters almost on a daily basis.

We intensely HATE parking enforcement personnel because they are sneaky and implacable – you can’t convince them not to give you a ticket, you can’t bribe them and you can rarely outsmart them. Parking enforcement people are the epitome of annoyance and personification of urban leprechauns.  They ruin our peace of mind, and our mood, they disrupt our harmony. 

While running your daily errands, you were lucky enough to find a spot at the meter, you put in quarters for 1 hour thinking you are going to make it, then you go get a haircut, and go buy a long-craved pecan pie at the local bakery but the line was so long that by the time you get to your car, your meter had expired and you see that disgusting white envelope with red lines on it on your windshield informing you that you got a ticket for expired meter. You are feeling nothing but frustration.

You visit your friends and park outside of their house to attend a pool party, but you forget that it’s only two-hour parking on their street. As you are returning to your car, relaxed and in a festive mood after enjoying beer, sausages, and ice cream in the pool, you see that same disgusting white envelope with red lines on your windshield informing you that you got a parking ticket for staying there for more than 2 hours. “Oh, shit!”
Your good mood immediately evaporates, you sobered up and angry.

 

Your contractor performing remodeling work in your house parked in your driveway – and you park your car last in the driveway so that the contractor would not block you as you are leaving for work. Your car partially protrudes into the sidewalk partially blocking it, but leaving enough space for a few rare pedestrians to go around on your quiet residential street. Parking enforcement chupacabra comes and gives you a parking ticket in your own driveway for partially blocking public sidewalk making you absolutely mad.

So on top of all these strong emotions associated with the need to pay the city for parking and with getting parking tickets, we are now learning that all this money is being spent on cushy jobs for the same very bloodsucking parking enforcement chupacabras who are giving us tickets and same very government bureaucrat parasites who already live at our expense but its never enough for them!  

The Department of Transportation in downtown LA is an ENORMOUS FUTURISTIC BEHEMOTH – so imagine how many government parasites are sitting there on their fat asses in their nice offices enjoying two-hour lunches, lavish salaries, and benefits, leaving at 4:30, knitting and chatting and browsing their cellphones on the job and mocking us the taxpayers and parking ticket payers and meter donors! 

Rather than expanding the freeways, and maintaining the busy streets properly, they are obsessed with setting aside useless bike lanes at the expense of driving space and building a subway system that is underused and full of criminals and thugs. 

Department of Transportation is helping the dangerously delirious city planners to urbanize LA which leads to worsening living conditions, more crime, more traffic, and all kinds of urban problems that do not exist in lower-density environments. Parking enforcement is at the forefront of supplying the money for malign activities by the bureaucracy that is behind this malicious push for urbanization.

There is only one important function that parking enforcement performs that some of us may be grateful for enforcing parking restrictions in some residential areas located close to busy streets to prevent outsiders from loitering there.  If there is permitted parking for local residents only and it is being strictly enforced it’s less likely that you will get ghetto thugs and juvenile delinquents parked outside of your house, making noise, smoking who knows what, fighting, playing loud music, and loitering!  

However, this one redeeming value of parking enforcement is by far outweighed by the daily nuisance and unnecessary expense that we have to endure from parking regulations, tickets, and meters.

It is clear that parking regulations and meters are mostly designed to generate revenue for self-serving bureaucracy – not to help city residents!  We don’t need them – they need us!  Therefore, Angelinos should advocate free parking on public property everywhere in the city, abolition of parking meters, major downsizing of parking enforcement, major downsizing of government apparatus that is overseeing it, reduction of benefits and salaries for government apparatus and refocusing the activities of remaining parking enforcement officers on patrolling residential neighborhoods to give tickets to outsiders who park there even though they have no business coming to that neighborhood.