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adwvn t1_j5g43c0 wrote

For years, I've talked to the police, council, and Congress rep. When I've talked to my neighborhood's police captain at the PPD, He assures me they will ticket when you call them. Not always the case. But I have a success rate of over 50% reporting it to the dispatcher and having a cop write a ticket. The captain advised that if after reporting the vehicle to 911 dispatch, and no one arrives to write a ticket, I should then call the local PPD and ask for the supervisor to make a Lack Of Service Complaint. That second call has always guaranteed an officer to arrive shortly and issue the ticket. So if I really want to insist that someone get a ticket, I make the second call to the local station.

But the PPD admittedly will not patrol parking and enforce it, they will ONLY write a ticket if a complaint is made to 911.

So if this is happening on your block frequently, you may need to become the local enforcer by constantly making the complaints. And the regular offenders will be ticketed and eventually learn to find proper parking spots. If you don't care to spend that much time and energy on it, I'm afraid city leadership is uninterested in tackling the issue.

As far as party politicians, the only solution a councilman or congressman will give you is "organize permit parking on your block." This will activate regular PPA patrol and enforcement for the block.

They should allow citizens to report illegal parking via app/online and collect bounties from the tickets because I would be making a killing.

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Fattom23 t1_j5gzz1n wrote

That Lack of Service complaint part is really helpful to know; I haven't been doing this. "Organize permit parking on your block" is a ridiculously inadequate solution, though, for so many reasons. First off, it's shitty that the PPA puts the onus on citizens to opt into enforcement, but that would only even work for the block you live on. As soon as you start walking anywhere, you're blocked by dickheads who are blocking a totally different block.

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flamehead2k1 t1_j5h41m2 wrote

> First off, it's shitty that the PPA puts the onus on citizens to opt into enforcement, but that would only even work for the block you live on.

I think it makes sense to be opt in. For better or worse, people generally don't want parking enforcement outside commercial adjacent areas.

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Fattom23 t1_j5h4rsn wrote

It makes sense to opt in to the time restrictions, because those are a service to the residents of the area: you now have a block of spots that the PPA will chase people out of on your behalf. In a sense, the PPA is now working to make spots available for you.

But the reality of the situation is that only the PPA may actually ticket for blocking a crosswalk or hydrant (PPD just won't). That being the case, making the PPA opt in is just asking a block whether or not they want the law to apply on their block (with both inertia and self-interest strongly biasing toward "no"). You shouldn't allow the people who have a strong feeling that they "need" to park in a crosswalk decide whether or not it's legal to park in a crosswalk.

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flamehead2k1 t1_j5h5a75 wrote

PPA isn't designed to do this. Expanding to just do corner coverage isn't viable. It dramatically increases the coverage area but barely increases revenue.

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Fattom23 t1_j5h5z8p wrote

Which brings us back to why "just opt in to PPA coverage" is totally inadequate as a response to why PPD isn't helping with this.

PPA opt-in is still insane for other reasons, though. The "voters" that you're trying to convince have probably noticed that instead of paying for a permit, they can have a reserved space for the low price of a stolen traffic cone and a threat to shoot someone, so their motivation to cooperate is low. But that's another whole conversation.

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flamehead2k1 t1_j5h86or wrote

If you flipped it to opt out. Most areas would still opt out.

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Fattom23 t1_j5h8ww8 wrote

I don't know. The power of inertia is extremely strong. However, the people who want the PPA out (because they want to put their cars wherever) would be very motivated. I'm fairly certain there would be at least one incident of violence or threats of violence over it (trying to get signatures that way).

People are weird about their cars and where they're going to put them. We can't just let people park wherever; the city would soon be covered with so many abandoned/unneeded cars that there wouldn't be room for anything else. That's why city leadership needs to make the unpopular calls on it (that's why we have governments). Unfortunately, we have the government we have, so they just say we can have a solution if we can convince 51% of our neighbors to agree. That way, no one at Council ever needs to make a choice.

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