There’s nothing quite as upsetting as walking to your car on a day you’ve had two midterms and are late for work only to find a little yellow piece of paper wedged under your windshield. What follows is an uncontrollable shout of profanity and a little prayer that the ticket won’t force you to drain your bank account. Your prayer is never answered.
Westwood, in general, is not a cheap place for a student to live, especially when you add in the unnecessarily high cost of parking tickets. It is clear that Westwood has a parking problem. With not enough designated parking spots for all of the students who need them, many are forced to turn to the streets.
Yet the streets of Westwood are plundered by a cruel and sly beast: the parking enforcement officer (none of whom could be reached for comment). This meter maid waits around until an innocent student leaves their car unattended and then slaps them with an outrageous parking fine, typically for the most nitpicky reason, that costs them upward of an arm and a leg.
The outrageously high cost of parking tickets would be easier to stomach if they weren’t so easy to get. But Westwood is a parking battlefield where only the elite receive on-campus parking permits or assigned apartment parking spots. The rest are left to fend for themselves for street spots, and often a street spot comes with an expiration date. If UCLA and its surrounding area could provide more spots, perhaps parking tickets wouldn’t be so inevitable.
Alas, street parking tends to be the obvious response to not having an assigned parking spot. Getting ticketed is, as previously stated, incredibly easy. It seems as if the parking officers go out of their way to penalize drivers in the UCLA area. Anna Scudder, a second-year international development studies student, recalls getting up to move her car for street-sweeping one morning and seeing parking enforcement officers waiting around for the clock to strike 8 ““ the time marked “No Parking.”
“There’s not even a minute of leeway,” Scudder said.
And it’s true. If you sleep for just a minute too long on a Friday morning, recovering from Thursday night’s festivities, and you fail to move your car before the posted time of street-sweeping, it will likely cost you $55. The parking police can’t wait to make that one minute of snoozing the most expensive minute of your life.
The parking officers are so overzealous in their ticket-giving that Scudder said she was once ticketed twice for the same parking offense.
“My car was parked on Friday where there is Friday street-cleaning,” she said, “so I got a ticket at 9:30, and then I got another ticket at 10:40. When I went to contest it they told me they were written by two different officers and the officers wrote down different addresses.”
Within that time, Scudder did not move her car and yet two different officers came by in just a little more than an hour of each other to ticket her, both at $55 a pop. Because the officers each wrote down that she was parked at a different address (mistakenly), she was unable to contest the double ticket. Some monthly parking spots in Westwood sell for the amount of money Scudder had to spend in that single morning, and for a full-time student, that kind of unreasonable penalty is just uneconomic.
There are a plethora of offenses for which one can be ticketed: failing to move your car for street-sweeping, not moving your car far enough away from your initial spot in a two-hour parking zone, sticking out too far from the curb or not displaying an updated registration sticker. The full list is lengthy. And with the streets of Westwood crawling with parking officers, the likelihood of you getting away with one of these offenses ticketless is slim to none.
It’s understandable that offenders get penalized, but is it really necessary for students to pay parking tickets that cost as much as a week’s worth of food? College students’ wallets are usually pretty anorexic-looking, and there isn’t a lot of flexibility to spend money frivolously on excessively priced parking tickets. Shouldn’t the parking enforcement officers prey on some other demographic? Perhaps a demographic with a larger bank account?
It is wholly unnecessary that parking officers in Westwood ticket as often as they do. If a student is five minutes late moving their car for street-sweeping, there should be a certain amount of leeway and understanding (Thursday night is party night, don’t they know that?). And if they must ticket, it shouldn’t cost as much as a month’s worth of cable.
Students have to live on a dime, and parking tickets in the Westwood area should reflect that. Parking offenders would learn their lesson easily enough with a $10 ticket. A $55 ticket is just cruel, especially considering the frequency with which they are lodged under students’ windshield wipers. Students should take back the streets from the ticketing tyrants and fight for their right to park without having to take out a second student loan.
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If you’re ticked-off by parking tickets, e-mail Hein at nhein@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.