Parking scofflaws beware, you may find your car immobilized if the city passes a new ordinance Tuesday night.
City Manager Randy Oliver is requesting that the City Council pass an ordinance that would allow a car immobilization device commonly known as a “boot” (an example is pictured at right) to be attached to a vehicle that has five or more outstanding unpaid parking tickets. Oliver believes parking ticket collection will be improved by this policy.
I agree. There’s really no good excuse for a person to have five or more unpaid parking tickets. If you’re going to have parking laws, they should be enforced. I don’t think there’s any doubt that this would be plenty of incentive for someone to finally pay what they owe to the city.
I agree the law should be enforced, and, to some extent this is the “broken window theory”, but I do believe we need torethink some of these laws.
People don’t like to go downtown already because of the cost and hassles of parking. Is this one more reason to avoid downtown? Many cities (Pekin?) offer 2 hours free parking on downtown streets. I know, downtown businesses should have demanded that fifty years ago, but, hey, this is Peoria. We do everything late.
Lighten up the parking restrictions, but crack down on the violators. Five violations seems to be somewhat generous, but I guess you have to start somewhere.
What prevents you from jacking up the car and changing the tire and then driving off without paying and with the boot?
The picture I used was just an example of a “boot”; it’s not necessarily the model Peoria will be using. If it does end up being the model Peoria uses, then I suppose you could take the tire off, but wouldn’t it be more expensive to go through all that trouble and buy a new tire than to just pay your parking tickets?
I guess that depends on how much you owe. My point was, if you can find their car to boot it, then screw the expense of buying boots and just find the person and lock them up until they pay. I think a few days of PB&jelly with tea will help them come around.
You cannot offer free or even 2 hour free parking downtown because of all of the people that work there. They would abandon the parking decks, taking up the free spots and moving their cars around during the day.
There are ‘boots’ that prevent the removal of the tires.
mdd,
Rock Island has something like the 2 hours of parking for free downtown. And they do sometimes have people that try to get around it by moving their car. But if the parking attendant recognizes the car, they still normally get a ticket. If this were the case, Peoria could make it 1 hour or 30 min. While that is not that much time, the people might start getting in trouble with their place of work. That is just my thoughts.
[...] Boots for parking ticket scofflaws — The council passed the ordinance that would allow an immobilization device (commonly referred to as a “boot”) on a car that has five outstanding, unpaid parking tickets on it. There were two amendments made to the ordinance — one was to allow 48 hours (instead of 24) for the tickets to be paid before impounding the car after the boot is applied; the other was to send notice to scofflaws that their car will be booted if they don’t pay up via certified mail instead of just regular mail. [...]