Parking Meter Samaritans, Watch Out!
By Anthony Todd in Miscellaneous on Apr 3, 2009 7:40PM
We’ve seen plenty of arrest-worthy parking meter shenanigans over the past couple of weeks: graffiti, vandalism, filling meters with pennies, gluing quarters into meter slots and more. The rage of Chicago residents over the increased parking fees seems to be growing steadily, and we expected to see stories about an upsurge in arrests and tickets as the city and the police retaliate. What we didn’t expect: threats of arrest for… paying parking meters.
The Expired Meter (always an entertaining read) has been in the early stages of creating a less violent anti-meter campaign. The author's approach seems to be to carry quarters in his pocket, and whenever he sees an agent of the Parking Enforcement Agency coming down the block, he quickly pays up any surrounding meters that have expired. This might cost him a couple of dollars, but it denies the city hundreds of dollars in ticket-related revenue.
Sounds like an interesting idea - at least, a less destructive one. Until he was threatened with arrest by a PEA collector! As he described it,
“Walking briskly down the street, I plunked two bits into one expired meter and than another, adding a crucial 15 minutes of life to each one and robbing the PEA of two more tickets on this north side street.“You can’t do that!,” she barked at me. “It’s illegal to feed someone else’s meter.”
“I don’t believe that’s true,” I calmly replied.
“Yes it is!!! And I could call the police on you,” she threatened with a yell, her face reddening.
“Go ahead,” I said, looking back at her in a feeble, pitiful and laughable Eastwood-esque posturing. “Go ahead and call the police…I’ll wait right here.”
She called my bluff and called the police on her radio. I exhaled nervously, mentally committing to staying put and not embracing all my instincts screaming at me to “run, run, RUN!!!.”
When the police finally arrived, they dismissed the whole thing, and after inquires to the city he discovered that it was not illegal to feed other people’s meters. He claims that this is just the beginning of a “Good Samaritan” campaign.