More About the Boot

Since reporting yesterday that the use of the boot had been suspended, Gossips had a conversation with Mayor Tiffany Martin Hamilton, who explained the reason for the suspension. According to the city code, a car can be booted if it has three tickets issued to it that have gone unpaid for more than 45 days. The part of the code that addresses the boot was added in 2011 because the ticket bureau was frustrated that a car needed to have five unpaid parking tickets before any punitive action, beyond simply increasing the fines, could be taken--the action being impounding the car. Logic says that the penalty for having three unpaid parking tickets should be less severe than the penalty for having five unpaid parking tickets, but in practice it often ended up being more severe. If the owner of a car that had been booted did not pay all the fines and penalties and the $120 fee to have the boot removed within 24 hours, the car would be towed, resulting in the owner having to pay an another $120 to rescue the car from wherever it had been impounded.

It was to eliminate this double jeopardy that the mayor suspended the use of the boot and, in doing so, effectively lowered the threshold for impounding a car. For now, until some better plan is devised, if you have three parking tickets that have gone unpaid for 45 days, your car will not be booted; it will be towed.

The moral of this story is: Avoid getting parking tickets. If you do get a ticket, pay the fine promptly. Otherwise, instead of going out one day to find a boot on your car, you might discover that your car is not where you left it, because it has been towed.
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