Another blow to Chicago motorists already fed up with red-light cameras, skyrocketing fines for measly violations, hugely inflated meter fees, and all other manner of abuse toward the car driver: Your parking tickets will increasingly come with photo evidence of your alleged misdeeds.
"It seems Chicago’s Dept. of Revenue (DOR) has had so much success utilizing photographic evidence when ticketing parking violators, the department has decided to utilize photography for for even more violations," the Parking Ticket Geek reports at The Expired Meter. "According to DOR management, the program was expanded the second week of February."
The program's objective is to discourage drivers from contesting their tickets, in order to save the city money processing the paperwork and defending itself, which must be more expensive than the photo program itself.
Of course, if the photographic evidence shows you to be guilty, there's not much to complain about.
At the same time, the evidence might be just what you need to prove that the car in question isn't even yours - or that it's not violating anything at all.
The Parking Ticket Geek, for one, doesn't plan on giving up fighting tickets. Like life's little joy of finding a parking meter with time still on it - soon to be taken away from us by new technology - fighting parking tickets can actually be satisfying even when your not a totally innocent victim. Something else is at play - fighting the whole oppressive system.
"If the photos provided by the city make the ticket irrefutable, then you may just want to pay," the Geek writes, "unless you’re mentally unbalanced like me."
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Or if you have a different idea of justice than the city.
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter and a big fan of The Expired Meter. He has fought parking tickets and won; don't get him started. You can subscribe to his NBCChicago.com RSS feed here.
