I’m going to traffic court tomorrow to adjudicate one of the Mrs parking tickets. Normally I’d just pay up. Not this one. It’s $50.

It was also uniquely got.

Normally, to get a parking ticket, the car must be parked. That means stopped, without occupant, in an illegal place.

In the Peoples Free Democrat Republic of Washington, D.C., that also includes several unique variations:

- at a legal place, but not at the right time;
- parked where some City Hall wanker, or fed gubmint mucky-muck wants to park for a plush conference attended on the taxpayer dime;
- parked in a zone that gets re-zoned during the day, without notice; the usual penalty for this is a $250 ticket, a boot ($175) and/or a tow ($225).
- PWW (parking while White)

Yep, parking enforcement is the one thing this City knows how to make money on.

Anyhow, the Mrs called the other day to let me know she was driving by my office in a minute, and I could come out and share with her the joyous commute home.

So I grabbed my stuff, a nice tall pile of case law to take home and read with a glass of Bulleit Bourbon Frontier Whiskey (an under priced treasure, BTW), and headed out. As I was leaving the front door of the building in which I work, I noticed that she was pulling up out front.

In the 30 seconds it took me to clear security and get to her car, a D.C. Parking Enforcement officer had punched out a ticket, and nailed her for double parking, obstruction of traffic, and some other bogus charge I can’t remember just now.

The supreme irony here is that it was nearly 8:00 at night, the rush hour traffic was long gone, and I work on a side street in the Federal Ghetto, so there was no traffic to obstruct.

The system is now so efficient, that the meter maids carry a device that looks like a Palm, punch in the license, hit a letter code for the infraction, and hit print. In 10 seconds, there’s a new ticket.

They raise about $25 million a year on parking tickets alone.

The problem is, with this shotgun approach, they hit a lot of people who really don’t deserve to be hit.

I have a friend who lives up on Capitol Hill. It’s a nice neighborhood, with densely packed in row houses, pretty little parks, and fairly quiet side streets. It was ghetto for a while, but with people moving back into D.C. and gentrifying, it’s bloody expensive. Anyhow, parking is scarce, moreso because a lot of the people who live there drive 22 foot SUV / Aircraft Carrier type vehicles.

One long weekend last year, Labor Day, I think, my buddy went to Pittsburgh for the long weekend. She left Thursday afternoon, flying up and leaving her car parked legally, with a sticker, in the appropriate zone.

Thursday afternoon, without notice, the City of Washington, D.C., changed the signs in her neighborhood, re-jiggering the parking zones. All the parking stickers that were good for her street… were no longer good. She needed to get a new sticker.

So the meter maid, who ticketed every car on the street with a $150 ticket right after the signs were changed, ticketed her car.

And ticketed it again on the Friday.

And again on Saturday.

And again on Sunday.

And again early Monday morning.

My friend got home from Pittsburgh late Sunday night, and she never noticed the pile of tickets on her windshield. Monday morning, she walked her dog, and noticed the tickets, and another shock: she had been booted, with a clamp over the wheel that prevented her from driving to work.

The grand total for all this was $750 in parking fines, and another $175 to get the boot removed.

All this because the City didn’t feel compelled to provide any notice that the parking zones would be changed.

So on Monday morning following the weekend, she came in late and crying, because she had to pay $925 in order to keep her car from being towed. She lost in her little hearing at Traffic Adjudication, and had to pay, otherwise it would be another $225 for the tow. So she got a new sticker that afternoon… and picked another ticket off her windshield when she got home.

This suggests there is a due process problem here.

Further, there is only one publicly available copy of the Parking Enforcement Code. The Code is minimally understandable; it’s hard to find what you are looking for, because it’s not well organized. The single publicly available copy is in the Martin Luther King Library, near Metro Center. You can peruse it, if you can pry the homeless people out of the way. (That particular library is packed with bums all day, every day – warm in the winter, cold in the summer, smelly as hell year ’round). To be fair, you can get the code online… if you happen to have a Westlaw account, and you are willing to futz around looking for the relevant clause at $200/hour for Westlaw access. The rest of the City’s code is available online… but not this one. The excuse on the City Council web site is that this part of the Code changes too frequently to keep it updated… hmmmm… but the paper copy at the MLK library is up to date, as is the Westlaw copy. One wonders if the traffic bar has had a hand in this.

This doesn’t suggest a due process violation; it screams it.

Regardless, the only solution will be a massive, multi-year class action law suit. There is too much money at stake for the City to stop systematically violating our rights.

But it will be a nasty, drawn out suit. The way the City litigates is to delay, delay, delay; so only a big firm with deep pockets will be able to take on the case. They can expect misrepresentations by counsel for the City; regular changes of attorneys, which always delay even simple cases by at least three to six months. They can expect the City to refuse to produce subpoenaed materials; all the usual dirty tricks litigators sometimes pull out of their sleeve.

In the end, there will be a massive award put into a trust fund for wrongly ticketed car owners. The lawyers will take $30 or $60 million, the outside counsel the City eventually hires will pocket $5 or $6 million, and then the City will find some new way of screwing us — like this proposed commuter tax.

So I’m not optimistic tomorrow. I’ve looked at the code relating to the violation the Mrs allegedly committed, and I don’t think it holds up. There’s a pretty clear exception for allowing people to stop wherever they want, to pick people up or drop people off. Moreover, none of the other normal conditions justifying a ticket here — such as a fire hydrant, “no standing” signs or actual traffic, were present.

Nevertheless, I expect the traffic adjudicator to laugh at me, say “pay $50″, hit the gavel on his desk and shout “NEXT”.

Yeah, I like living here for some of the nice sports, culture and recreational opportunities, and the interesting people you meet. But shit, if this is the capital of the free world, I don’t want to know how bad the government’s are elsewhere.