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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

And? Don't park in snow emergency routes during a historic blizzard.

  The advisory said they issued 2,091 parking tickets in the
  first three hours of the mayor’s declaration.

  The tickets drew backlash from drivers who said they were 
  unable to dig out their cars. Others said they did not feel 
  comfortable driving in the snow, some because their cars 
  were not properly equipped for it.

3 hours after the declaration, and for cars that could not reasonably be moved because of said emergency. Have some fucking empathy.

We knew the storm was coming days before. Snow emergency routes are posted and publicly known. People's cars couldn't be stuck there due to the snow unless they failed to move their cars before the storm like they were required to do. This failure makes it much harder to clear important roads and impedes emergency services. Ticketing these people seems entirely appropriate to me.

This is what my friends in DC feel as well. There was a lot of lead up to the storm, and well before it hit you could have moved your car elsewhere. But people were "betting on the come" as they say in Craps and they were parking there assuming that either a) they would be able to move if it snowed, and b) if it snowed so much that they couldn't move well the city would have bigger problems than ticketing them.

If the law is amended, it should be amended to read "It is illegal to park on a snow emergency route at time time during and 24hours before a snow emergency. A snow emergency exists when the city declares it." Then the city could announce the emergency before the snow started, and start warning people, and then start ticketing people, and ideally by the time the snow hit there would be few if any cars in the emergency snow lanes.

The emergency did go into effect before the snow actually fell. Not 24 hours before, but most of the ticketing and towing was right before or immediately after the snow started falling.

That's not exactly how it played out. FTA: "Mayor Bowser announced the snow emergency the day before the storm hit, on Thursday, and parking enforcement officers and tow drivers moved swiftly once it went into effect on Friday morning."

Also, looks like the mayor is voiding all the tickets from the 22nd: http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Mayor-Bowser-Voids-A...

> Mayor Muriel E. Bowser declared the emergency on Friday before a storm that dropped as much as 26 inches on the capital.

That sentence there carries the word "before", which suggests that when the mayor made the declaration, the blizzard had not yet snowed in any cars.

As others noted, the declaration happened before the weather hit. People could reasonably move their cars. All of the affected spaces are super clearly marked and people who park there regularly should've had very ample warning about it.

Additionally, based on my understanding, a lot of local parking lots/garages drastically dropped their rates to help accommodate.

I would be more inclined to have some empathy if my local drivers didn't think the city's bicycle lanes were an appropriate place to park for the next week because they are too lazy to dig out a parking space.

These fuckwits had advanced warning of the blizzard and still parked in a way to hinder emergency response capabilities. How you can paint them as innocent people who were fucked over is beyond me.

3 hours after the declaration there was not a single flake of snow on the ground.

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