Tag Archives: illegal parking

“I’ll only be here a minute….”

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Look at this carefully:

Parking violators at an elementary school in MA

Parking violators at an elementary school in MA

The owner of that uber shiny, big, white Mercedes Benz is parked illegally (no placard, no need) in the handicapped spot at an elementary school.  I am at this school every Saturday  during the school year with my daughter for her language class, and I’d say every week there at least two cars parked illegally in the three handicapped spaces.

The Town and Country minivan is parked illegally too.  No placard AND they are partially parked in the hatch marks.  Somehow, it’s the Mercedes that really pushed me over the edge, so I took a picture to show to the administration of the school.  Taking the picture made me feel marginally better, because the driver was sitting behind the wheel.

If it’s one of your peeves, how many times have you approached someone so parked only to be looked at in disbelief or with incredulity.  If the offender even deigns to respond, it’s usually a blithe explanation that “No one needs it right now” or “I’ll only be here for a minute.”

Well, check out this post in the New York Times recently:

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/using-an-app-to-report-handicap-parking-violations/?_r=2

Calling out the violator either doesn’t work (in my experience) or could result in their meeting your remarks with aggression.   But the ability to take a picture of the car and license plate, email it to the police station and have them deal with it (even if all they do is issue a warning) would be so satisfying.  At least you can feel like you’ve done something.  This app sounds genius to me.

What do YOU think?

The (Tired and Moody) Modern Hotel, Boise ID

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Last year we loved it.  This year: not so much.

The motel seemed tired this year: the rugs in both rooms (we are a family of five so we rent two rooms) were dirty and stained, the walls were marked up and the bathroom countertop in one of the rooms was burned. The staff seem a little jaded too, and at times seemed rather put out that they had to answer a customer.  Two times our room reservation was messed up (I won’t go into all the details here).  If you need an ADA room, there are only two and one (the bigger one) is in front of the bar, which can be very loud at night.

But check out this photo I took.  This is what really soured me on the hotel:

 

The owner of The Modern Hotel and Bar thought this was a perfectly good spot to park.

The owner of The Modern Hotel and Bar thought this was a perfectly good spot to park.

The car parked oh-so-illegally, in the ADA-defined spaces AND in the cross hatches for minivan entry and egress is the OWNER of the hotel.  There are two ADA-spaces:  one was taken, so we parked in the other.  But because this black car was parked in the cross hatches where the ramp would go, we couldn’t get our daughter out of the car without backing into the road.

When I went to the desk to make them aware that someone was parked in such a way as to impede our daughter’s mobility in the parking lot, they nonchalantly said they’d look into it.  Because I could see the car from our room, I checked back in with them when the car was still parked there 20 minutes later, only to be told that it was the owner of the hotel and she’d be leaving soon.  She didn’t leave “soon.”  And they didn’t seem to really care that their customer wasn’t happy about it.

I met the owner a day later when she was serving me a coffee in the bar.  As she clearly knew who I was, this would have been the perfect time for her to have acknowledged that she had parked – wrongly – in the ADA space.  I wasn’t looking for her to fall on her sword;  I just would have liked to hear her say, “Hey, I didn’t realize the impact I had on someone who needs those spaces.  Sorry.”  That’s all.  Recognition that those spaces are there for those who need them, and not for anyone’s convenience, would have been sufficient.

If you have two good legs, or set of lungs, or heart, then celebrate that.  Walk a few more feet or even several blocks and leave those spaces for someone who needs them.