Upon failure to pay the punishment would usually be having their license suspended and have a warrant taken out on them. So a boot wouldn’t even be needed, Putting boot on the car to begin with is unnecessary, it’s putting someone’s property hostage before a legal verdict has taken place.
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In my city they simply tow your car. And you end up having to pay fees on top of fines to get your car back. The city makes it very clear they are not responsible for the damages your car inevitably suffers from these forced towings.
A former boss was booted once and he took the wheel off, put his spare on, and drove back to the office. He then had somebody in the shop cut the boot off and put his original wheel back on. It’s been almost 20 years since I worked there, so I have no idea if anything ever came of it.
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I’d say towing is less problematic. And generally there are clear signs saying that cars in violation will be towed. Also i did some minor Googling and apparently booting people’s cars is illegal in some states and has been regularly used illegally even within states that do allow it.
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Well, that’s not quite true. It depends on the nature of the damage. If the tow truck operator does something negligent and damages your car (like if they don’t use a flatbed or wheel dollies for your AWD car and your transmission is damaged), you can sue and win. Small scratches and other minor issues that result from normal towing are your problem.
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In college I worked as an appeals officer for the parking enforcement folks. My take on it is that parking spaces are a shared community resource, and the people violating parking regulations are like the wealthy who avoid paying taxes.
That said, boots puzzle me. Why make it impossible for a vehicle to leave a place it shouldn’t be to begin with?
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Agree. My employer actually used to put boots on cars that would park in the spots reserved for pregnant women if they did not have the proper sticker. Can you imagine, being pregnant and going into labor at work, you run out to your car to get to the hospital, but you can’t because you didn’t know you needed a sticker. Talk about a lawsuit waiting to happen. They no longer use boots, but they will ticket and eventually tow.
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It looks to me like you are correct about that, GD. Tesouras Tuga had it up on 11/30, and RM Videos on 12/2. It looks from comments on other parts of their site that RM Videos goes around the web and steals other people’s videos to make a profit off them.
In case anybody was wondering, this video is from Lisbon and the word “Tuga” is despective slang for “Portuguese.” EMEL is the Empresa Municipal de Mobilidade e Estacionamento de Lisboa, which put the rinky-dink boot on the dude’s car.
My favorite part of this video is when he puts the boot in his trunk and the peanut gallery laughs. Good humor.
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Right! A boot is only going to exacerbate the problem, and in a way invalidates the reason for the law. Meanwhile, towing companies are like sharks, an illegally parked car in any city could towed in a matter of minutes and the initial problem resolved.
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Imagine the parking authority explaining to the judge how they couldn’t find the car and then they found it in the first place they looked.
(Maybe that’s why he kept the tape.)
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Same. Except the Australian version. Boot = trunk for US readers.
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Routinely you boot cars that are parked legally. Once someone incurs some number of delinquent parking tickets they’re subject to being booted or towed the next time the police encounter the car (a ticket isn’t delinquent when it’s issued). If they’re parked in a legal space their car is booted. If not they are towed.
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Because (ideally) you boot cars that are parked in legal spaces and tow from spaces where it’s not legal to park. Once a car has a sufficient number of delinquent tickets (not just tickets) it is eligible to be ticketed or towed the next time a police encounter it on public streets. If it’s parked legally it is merely booted.
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In most places you’re only eligible to be booted when you have a sufficient number of delinquent parking tickets. ie after you’ve either appealed and lost or failed to appeal.
From the quick glance i took it seems that some places will put the boot on the car as the first option. Found an article from San Antonio where there were cases where the boot had been put on cars before their meter had even been up, and at least in San Antonio a warning must be given first which was not occurring in all instances.
I’d say ticket the car, go for a tow if a car is delinquent on unpaid tickets.
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It’s worth noting here that where I worked, we automatically granted appeals for the first offense. I would say that it’s always worth appealing a parking citation. However, repeat offenders and people who illegally parked in designated handicap spots got no mercy.
Certain people violated parking regulations so frequently that they were designated for automatic towing for every offense. Those people ONLY parked illegally. These were persons of reasonable intelligence who were somehow unable to conceive of parking regulations. You can’t park on the sidewalk. You can’t double park. You can’t park perpendicular in a parallel spot. They knew these things on an intellectual level, but weren’t able to apply them in day-to-day life, and they believed that parking enforcement was a bunch of bullies who had singled them out for persecution.
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Not much change across the decades.
The whole idea that we should be able to leave our private property out in the open, and then come back for it whenever we want… Its kind of a strange notion when you think about it. But people are so habituated to free parking that there is little recourse left.
[edited to add]
This doesn’t seem strange for scooters or bicycles, where the object being left isn’t that much bigger than the person riding it. But for cars, it just gets ridiculous.
Now I’m wondering what parking problems would occur with horses and buggies.
This wouldn’t happen to him in California, where he’d own a fraudulent disability placard.
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