Easy Parking to Expire at Month’s End

Take a close look at D.C. streets these days. At times specified for street-sweeping, you’ll find huge swaths of open parking spaces, presumably to make way for those orange Department of Public Works machines that gobble up leaves and debris.

But guess what: Those machines take the winter off. And ticket writers don’t enforce the parking restrictions, either. According to a DPW press release, there’ll be no tickets for street-sweeping violations until April 2.

So, if the rules aren’t in force, why are so many people complying with them? That’s DPW’s fault. Sure, they issue press releases and some media outlets pick up the news. But who’s really gonna burrow into the briefs on Page B8 to find this information?

The fix is obvious. DPW should just change the street-sweeping signs to say something to the following effect: “Not in effect from Dec. 1 through March 31.” If it’d be too costly to make permanent changes, hell, they could just affix some stickers.

No such luck. As a result, a lot of clueless folks are hustling their asses to move their cars by 9:30 a.m. on weekday mornings.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 10:05 am and is filed under Bureaucracy, Cars, DPW, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.