Musical chairs with cars

 

November 17, 1998

 

When I came out onto the street last night and saw my car missing, I knew the city had taken it.

Hoboken is on a non-stop campaign to steal cars, although they claim it is on account of the residents.

Poor urban planning left the city short of parking spots, and the PATH to Manhattan caused commuters to drive here, park all day, causing residents to protest.

Hoboken in response developed a resident parking ordinance, one of the first in the country and certainly the first in the state, and questionably constitutional on both the national and state levels.

Under this ordinance, people can come in, park for four hours, and then must leave. If they park longer than four hours they get towed.

 Residents are issued parking permit decals, for a yearly $5 fee. Businesses are issued a placard for their windows, also for a $5 fee. Visitors are given temporary passes, as long as they are connected to some resident. Everyone else risks losing their car to the tow trucks.

A Hoboken Parking Authority person walks up and down the streets of the city looking for permits. Those without get their license plate number and physical location written up. Four hours or so later, this person returns. If the car is still parked in the same place (and sometimes when it is not), the person called for a tow truck.

Sometimes residents themselves call when a car has been parked in front of their building too long, part of their claim to these spots.

Of course, they each believe that the restrictions are intended to protect their right to park. If that were the case, then the city would have also restricted development, or limited the number of permits it issued to the number of apartments, or condos, rather than those whose vehicles are registered to an address. The fact is, local officials like the overcrowding, because it provides them with additional revenue, a kind of musical chairs only performed with cars. Because there are so few spaces, people inadvertently park illegally and for too long. Each is ticketed or towed, each feeds the court system, the fines from which feed the surplus the following year.

Thus the mayor can keep his cousins on the payroll, without fear of too much flack, since the salaries are generated through more and more aggressive ticketing. The towing business alone brings in forty dollars in fines for each car brought to the lot. The tow trucks bring in car after car from six a.m. until 10 p.m. The tow truck company gets the cash for the tow, the city gets the cash from the ticket.

I had the unfortunate luck not to have gotten a business pass. I had asked for the letter from the woman at work, but her mind was elsewhere and by the time I went to ask again, she had gone off on her honeymoon. Since our place was about to provide day time parking for the staff, I did not push the issue, even though one my fellow employees was towed two days before I was.

 So standing there in the dark, I cursed the city and its thievery, then slowly made my way down to city hall, where I could get my car set free -- for a fee.