Anybody who lives near a Universtity can attest to the overpopulation of students with cars. As such, these cars tend to end up parking on (a) the wrong side of the street, (b) across sidewalks, and © on people’s lawns. All of these things will get you a parking ticket in Syracuse and the police are not reserved in handing them out.
If you don’t live in a town where parking alternates from one side of the street to the other on a daily basis I will explain it to you. The wintertime in Syracuse tends to bring with it a good amount of snowfall. In an attempt to keep the streets relatively snow free, the city says that most streets allow parking on only one side of the street at a time. The twist is that that side switches every day. This is supposed to help the snowplows get a full sweep over each street every two days or so. I think it actually does help, but the system is a real pain in the ass. It gets especially annoying during the summer, when there isn’t any real good reason to alternate the parking, seeing as how we don’t get much snow that time of year.
Back to my point. With the local authorities giving out hoardes of tickets to students, you would think that the city would make a good amount of cash from the student neighborhoods that could be used to put more police patrols out on the streets. It is my belief that a good deal of these parking tickets go unpaid because there are a lot of students who graduate and then leave New York to go back to thier home state (or somewhere warmer, at the very least.) Since they have no vested interest in keeping a clean record of parking tickets in a state they don’t care much for, they don’t bother paying the tickets. I know that if I ever got a parking ticket while I was in a nother state I probably wouldn’t bother to pay it.
What to do about this?
I had the thought in my head that the University could make students pay outstanding parking tickets in order to recieve thier diploma’s when they graduate, but I am starting to reconsider that plan. It is certainly an interesting idea, and I’m sure that the city would love the University for it.
dfc thinks that this amounts to treating students unfairly under the law and it punishes students for a flawed parking ticket system. I can’t agree on the part about treating students differently under the law; the University is a private organization and they have every right to institute a “good citizen standing” as part of the graduation requirements if they want to. You can’t graduate if you owe the library boatloads of money, so why does the University let the city get balked on this one. This, of course, brings up the question of what would a state college do in this situation?
As for the system being flawed, I will agree with that. At least the parking ticket situation isn’t as bad in Syracuse as it is in other places, Boston for example. I can’t really comment much on this issue, although I will say that I wonder how cost effective it would be to have our city police spend more time enforcing delinquent parking tickets instead of stoping robberies.
Interestingly enough, I found this (about halfway down the page, “A Post-Graduate Course in Government Finance”) tidbit about the city of Boston trying to do exactly what I just wrote about.
Quote from the story:
Boston parking enforcement officers wrote $6.5 million in tickets that weren’t paid in 2002.
I would love to see the numbers for the City of Syracuse.
Posted by dbgrandi at November 17, 2003 09:45 PM | TrackBack