It's time for legislators and the DMV to crack down on disabled parking cheats

Why is it "time"? Is there some critical shortage of handicapped parking? Every time I go anywhere with a parking lot, there seems to be lots of available handicapped parking. Obviously it's great fun to feel indignant when you have to park in a less-good spot while someone with a placard pulls in and walks in - clearly a cheat - but if it's not actually significantly affecting people on average, just write it off as cost of doing business.

That said, I even caution against judging other people for their use of a disabled placard without an apparent motion disability. I had a friend who had nothing obviously wrong with him (I was friends with him for about a year before I even knew he had a disabled placard), but one day he gave me a ride and apparently felt the need to explain to me that he has MS, and that walking was quite painful for him even though he moved with an apparently normal pace and gait. Presumably there are many other reasons why an otherwise normal-looking person would have and/or use one of these placards, so I really think you need to come in with more than anecdotes about people who don't seem disabled.

I'm a placard holder and I think this article is full of horrible ideas. The fee, the weird limitations on metered parking use for people with particular disabilities or impairments, but most of all the way the article uncritically invites people to scrutinize placard holders and try to tell by looking at them if they are "really disabled" or not. With the existing laws, placards must be renewed every 2 years. If the DMV is issuing renewals to dead people as the article claims, that seems fixable without screwing the rest of us over.

Charging handicapped people fees doesn't make sense. I mean it's literally charging someone for being injured. (On top of that, many of them are on some kind of welfare which means the state would be taking back money they just gave the person.)

Just because someone can walk from the closest parking space into a store doesn't mean they aren't injured and don't need a placard. So opening the article that way really demonstrates a lack of understanding.

Its fascinating to see problems in other states. Locally (thousands of miles from CA) the "new urbanists" have a stealth strategy for discouraging car use which is to write ridiculous handicapped requirements into zoning laws. So new stores have to have 20 to 30 handicapped spots to discourage car use by the 99% unhandicapped customers. So no matter how big your parking lot is, and how packed it is with customers, roughly 20% of spots will always be empty. Its an interesting strategy for banning cars, they're not technically banning cars from parking, its just parking now requires a handicap tag. It has the pleasant side effect that even at major sporting events I've never actually seen a parking lot with all handicapped spots filled, which must be very convenient for handicapped people.

There are other problems. I used to work with a guy in a wheelchair and life for those people is hell, at least once a week when his non-handicapped brother picked him up in the lift van after work, some do-gooder would scream at his brother for being evil enough to park in a handicapped spot, he would even get blocked in until the cops arrive, do-gooders just make life for everyone awful.

Well, if this isn't a slippery slope...

I can just imagine the process when someone starts having the power to tell people they aren't disabled enough to get a placard.

We like to think these things will follow some common-sense logic, but in reality that's rarely the case.

There's some low-hanging fruit like revoking old placards, but I don't think this should get a whole lot of attention. Perhaps I'm just not part of the club that says we need police to make sure people aren't being assholes.

> A doctor’s certification is required to obtain a placard or plate, but 73% of the applications that were reviewed "did not fully describe the disability."

Is it the DMV's responsibility to review medical claims and determine eligibility, or does the doctor determine eligibility and the DMV simply fills the request? If it's the latter I don't see any reason fro DMV paperwork to describe the disability at all.

> Also, 18% of the doctors’ signatures did not match those on file with state health boards. The auditor questioned whether 260,000 placards issued over a three-year period were valid.

What's the point of requiring a signature if it's not going to be verified? These should be investigated and if the doctor didn't sign them, that's fraud.

> A lot of placards that exist were issued to people now dead. They haven’t been canceled. The DMV catches many by checking state death records, but could identify thousands more by also examining federal data. The auditor figures at least 35,000.

I can't imagine this is costing the taxpayers any money or that people are using their dead grandmother's handicapped placard.

> As of June, there were 26,000 people age 100 or older holding placards, based on DMV data. But there are only an estimated 8,000 centenarians living in California.

This seems like it overlaps most of the prior point.

> There is no limit on the number of replacement placards a holder can receive if one is "lost" or "stolen." Auditors found several people who had received 16 or more placards over a three-year period.

Imagine that, someone who is elderly and/or disabled misplaced a placard they may only used once a month when they go grocery shopping.

Is the author of this piece the disabled police? People's disabilities don't have to be apparent by looking at them to be real. My dad probably doesn't look disabled but he has the lingering effects of the damage caused by a childhood ankle injury which became chronic and the surgery to make it better had the side effect of further limiting his ankle movement making walking much more difficult. He's ok if he walks a little bit but too much and he's out of commission and further aggravates the damage.

Someone with MS probably has limited mobility that isn't apparent as well.

Sounds like an incredible waste of time. Actually enforcing this stuff is difficult because it's a personal issue. People have different pain thresholds and challenges.

I'm always puzzled by how they allocate these resources anyway. They took away about 80 spots at the mall where our local Apple store is to make rows of handicapped spots. They are generally empty to begin with, and then you have the issue of context. If you can't walk 300 yards from the parking lot, what do you do when you need to walk a quarter mile in the mall? That probably has a lot to do with the empty spots.

Well, on the brighter side this issue at least keeps the author and his zeal for poorly thought out solutions to small societal problems from terrorizing some HOA or zoning board.

I had a cousin who had a temporary placard because he had knee surgery and was supposed to walk a very limited amount throughout the recovery. He wasn't "disabled" per say but he wouldn't have recovered properly if he had been walking everywhere during his recovery. I wonder what the author would think of him.

I think one reason you see "think pieces" like this is that handicapped parking spaces are a massively under-utilized resource. I have never seen them all used, not even close, but often I've seen a full or nearly full lot with the best possible spots free and unusable because they are marked handicapped. Able bodied people tend to get selfishly frustrated when they are forced to walk all the way from the back of the lot in these circumstances.

One solution to this would be to allow pregnant woman and parents with young children (under the age of 5) to park in handicapped spots. This would lead to a higher utilization, and greater safety. Little kids can be hard to control, and dart everywhere, saving just a few young lives would make it worthwhile. And pregnant women shouldn't be forced to park in the back of the lot, esp. when they'll need to carry groceries or other purchases.

Accommodations like this I would hope would also cool the jets of people like the author. They'd see the handicapped spaces being used more, and hopefully realize there is a wide range of people in our society who need this assistance.

For a laugh, I'd sure love to see the half-baked list of disabilities the author thinks solely merit a handicapped placard, which he has doubtless already compiled.

What sucks is that there tends to be a stigma that goes along with having a placard, because, among other reasons, it's sometimes the case that onlookers judge someone who puts up a placard on their mirror as if they are lying about their disability just to park closer. It's one of the reasons why people with legitimate disabilities tend not to use them when they have them, even at meters.

Author contributes to this by seemingly lumping people who have real, non-apparent disabilities with those who pretend to have a disability.

Remember not every who is disabled looks it. For instance: Cystic Fibrosis. Many with CF just look thin, but may have less than 30% of expected lung capacity.

That said, I have a family member who is a 16 year old soccer star who has a handicap tag. Her grandfather, who is a disabled vet, bought her car, and apparently due to how the registration works she also got the same tag. (I have no idea if she abuses this however; she seems pretty honest)

Maybe if they just get rid of the free meter parking people would stop wanting to cheat.

Locally (Arlington, VA), the handicapped cannot park at meters for free. Back in the late 1990s, they started their "All may park. All must pay." campaign -- the point being to "remove the value of the handicapped placard." If you still have to pay to park, it does not help when you park at meters. There are some handicapped spots on the street with meters.

According to this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDn6jiq_FjM

All we have to use is use that sign and 100% of this will cease to exist. I highly doubt his 100% number will hold in the aggregate, but even if it's 80% that's impressive for just changing the signage.

This reminds me of a recent problem at work.

Basically, it was a problem caused by a fix to a problem caused by a fix to a problem caused by a bad design decision. The obvious fix would have altered the behavior of the first fix, which we weren't sure we could do, because someone may have come to rely on the behavior of the first fix.

But overall, we were just very frustrated that we couldn't just address the initial bad design decision, and make the whole mess evaporate into the aether, because none of those problems exist with the standard (and good enough) design.

The disability parking placard is a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a problem caused by a bad design decision. We can't exactly go all the way back to the root problem without a time machine, but we don't have to be stuck messing around at the leaf-level of the problem tree.

The best solution to the blue parking spaces problem is probably not to mess around with plates and placards. It may actually be to reduce the need for anyone--and the people with mobility impairments in particular--to continually walk across parking lots in order to live their lives.

There shouldn't really be that much of a distinction between medically unable to walk, too lazy to walk, and too busy/important to walk. If everyone only had to walk as much as they wanted to, no one would have to pretend they couldn't. The real problem is that everything in the US is already so far apart you can't economically walk any of it, and therefore you have to drive. So you have to make everything even further apart, to accommodate cars. But now you have to walk and drive and park and walk. Then you have to regulate parking for people who can't walk as much. And then people cheat, because they already have to park so far away from the place they actually want to be. You're just piling patches on top of fixes.

So you design to eliminate the walking in the first place, and have your parks and rec departments install unnecessary superfluous walking trails for the people who still want to walk without a treadmill.

(This is essentially the same problem in Dwarf Fortress for how to get and maintain a large population without killing your framerate. You essentially have to eliminate pathfinding from your fortress, so that your dwarves never have to walk more than a few steps to do anything. It is tremendously difficult to do that without some very detailed planning.)

1.) Just because someone doesn't "look disabled" doesn't mean they aren't actually disabled.

2.) Just like the voter ID thing, show that it's actually a problem before devoting a bunch of resources on a witch hunt.

The less that the DMV is responsible for, the better. When they can get the wait time for renewing a driver's license down under multiple hours, maybe I'll consider them competent for additional duties.