Author: Dan Delluomo
Along with death and taxes, getting a ticket while parked on the wrong side of the road in Buffalo is one of the few certainties in life. I’ve been living in the Elmwood area for four years. I never calculated the exact amount I’ve squandered on parking tickets here—maybe I never wanted to know. But rest assured, we’re talking about a four-digit number. Truth be told, I got a ticket today.
Buffalo’s parking ticket squadron runs like a well-oiled German machine—each part operates with surgical precision and ruthless efficiency. The tickets start printing at 9 am. If you’re parked “illegally” at 9:05, you’re already facing a 50-50 chance of having a ticket. By 9:15, you’re 90% ticketed. And by 10 am, you’d have a better chance of seeing a flying pig than not seeing a bright-orange windshield present. Boom! $30.00 fine ($45 in a week)!
If everything in Buffalo ran so smoothly, we’d be in the best city on Earth. It would be one thing if the enormous ticket proceeds were put toward good causes. But wherever that cash horde goes, it’s certainly not toward practicalities like the giant potholes on Main Street and Elmwood that go unpaved for years at a time.
Getting a ticket in Buffalo is not a matter of incompetence or laziness—many of the smartest, most diligent people I know have fallen victim. The “legal” side of the street changes bi-weekly, the system is not intuitive, and the parking signs are often few and far between. Several of my friends were ticketed for parking in front of my old house on Summer Street—because it’s a bus route between November and April. (The sign is about 100 yards up the road.)
The ticketing in our city is notorious, and many suburbanites are deterred from coming downtown for precisely this reason. That means fewer consumers for businesses—it’s tough to attract drivers who are terrified of the ticket-Nazis patrolling our streets like vultures all day, enforcing obscure laws with fanatic vigor.
The hard-working people of Western New York are sick and tired of being swindled out of their hard-earned money. This is our city. It doesn’t belong to officials looking to pilfer more revenue. We need to cut the parking lot task force in half, or by two-thirds. To deter people from blocking snowplows and street-sweepers (the alleged purpose of alternate parking), any reasonable chance of getting a ticket will do—it doesn’t have to be 100%.
We especially need to cut down during the summer: if clearing way for street sweepers is actually a legitimate reason to have alternate summer parking, it’s a decidely minor one—spotting a street-sweeper on a neighborhood street is like seeing a unicorn.
Letting more parking violations slide will create a more welcoming atmosphere, one more conducive to tourism, business, and happiness. And think of all the trees and orange dye that will be saved!