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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> That’s the Philly euphemism for what is formally known as “relocation towing” — when the police department, Philadelphia Parking Authority, or a private towing company moves vehicles from legal parking spots for special events, construction or emergencies.

I can see needing to move a vehicle in an emergency, but for special events and construction this shouldn't be needed in most cases. The city knows months in advance the date on which the streets need to be clear. They should plaster the neighborhood in warning notices a month before the event, then go through again the night before to check for stragglers who'd forgotten.

If people seriously end up thinking their car got stolen, there's a massive failure of communication. My thought should be "oops, I forgot about the event", not "where the hell is my car?!"

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> They should plaster the neighborhood in warning notices a month before the event

I grew up in Seattle but lived in Philly for 2 years and this was one of the strangest things to me. In many cases they don't post _any notices at all._

I knew enough people who got "courtesy" towed with no records that I added a GPS tracker to our car to make sure I could find it.

Seattle, for anyone who hasn't lived there, has a set of folding barricades marked 'No Parking' with a blank space to put dates and times. I believe you can even go to the city and borrow a set yourself for things like sidewalk repairs, taking down a tree, moving vans, or having a forklift show up to move something into your yard, though these seem to go out pretty close to the event whereas I saw city ones show up two weeks before something major.

From a smaller data sample, parts of Oregon also do this as well.

It's a pretty normal thing here in Massachusetts that you can get some placards to post on the street for when people are bringing in moving vans and whatnot. I believe you get these from the town you live in.

As someone relatively new to Philly, I am not at all surprised by the need for relocation towing. In the immediate Philadelphia metro area, but outside center city parking is extremely sparse. It's not uncommon for me to help squeeze neighbors into barely large enough parallel parking spots (by waving them in) at midnight. Some of these folks live more than 6 blocks away and purportedly were looking for parking after getting off work for an hour or longer.

Philadelphia is also the first place I have lived where parking in the center median of major thoroughfares is normal:

https://www.google.com/search?q=philadelphia+center+median+p...

Speaking of, I live a block off South Broad Street (most of the images in the link) and not too long ago there was a marathon that required clearing of that street of all parked cars for its entire length. It _was_ well communicated, well in advance but you can imagine that if parking is tight when the street side parking _and_ the center median is chalk full of cars, relocating is difficult. I don't know if any cars were relocation towed, but I know the night before the event I still saw some cars parked on Broad.

I still think there are communications issues, the city should have a way for owners to find their car. But I also think it's a bit more complex than your first take. Communication is hard and at the scale of Philadelphia I am not too surprised that there are cases where things can go awry between all the various bureaucracies you have to interact with in something like this. I also think it's pretty reasonable that the lawsuit is looking to force improvements, not do away with the system.

My car got towed while I was on a trip during that race a few years ago when I lived off of South Broad Street (:

I was parked in the middle of Broad and Snyder (in this section of South Philly it’s acceptable to park illegally in the middle of the street) because I couldn’t find another spot and had a flight to catch.

Came back a week later, car gone. Walked around for a couple hours then approached a cop parked nearby. After quite a bit of back and forth on the radio he told me my car was parked over 20 blocks away, curtesy tow.

Another time I parked on a Thursday, slept through a hangover on Saturday and missed the police posting for a street festival. That was some ordeal getting it back on Sunday. Took a couple hours and I think $250 or so.

Was this comment written by GPT-3, or is it just contrarian for contrarianism's sake? Posted signs stating parking restrictions is the standard way of communicating parking restrictions, temporary or permanent. The notice window doesn't even have to be that long, although it's nice for it to be so that people can plan ahead. For example, in Boston it is illegal to stay parked in the same spot for more than 72 hours, so the city puts up signs at least 3 days ahead of time. If a car is still parked somewhere, it has either violated the temporary restriction or the 72 hour rule. Also if a car is towed, it's towed to a city lot rather than a random street. Getting your car out of a tow lot sucks but at least it's predictable. Problem solved - there is nothing "complex" about this.

This makes me incurably angry as longtime resident of South Philly. You sound like your head is in the clouds to a local. Why? Because our city operates roughly above the 3rd world level.

Nobody puts signs up

Nobody gives notice

Nobody gives a good God dammed.

Park where you can, hope your car is there tomorrow, hope there isn't a gas leak, road collapse or towed randomly

Its so absurd we had a TV show called Parking Wars.

I was courtesy towed last week. I spend a year backing down a narrow (one car width) alley because we had a pothole the size of Alaska. I pushed an abandoned car onto broad street during rush hour to get it towed after 6 months. I had my car towed because of a local celebrity funeral. All my tires were slashed during the BLM riots. My friends car was flipped at the Phillies parade, anothwrs at the eagles rally. I've gotten hit with a baseball bat for asking someone to move their car.

Welcome to hell

Edit: did I mention our parking "authority" is extremely predatory, run as a nepotism program for local Republicans, siphons money from the city and has been routinely found to be absolutely kafkaesque. So bad they actually had their own petty court removed for being a essentially kangaroo court?

I don't know why my comment would make you angry. I'm not saying "everything is fine", rather pointing out how it works in other cities, as an example of some sanity to push for. The comment I was responding to was full of handwavey reasons why any sort of change would be too complicated, essentially justifying the status quo. I would think that if you wanted reform, that is the type of thing what would make you angry.

It makes me angry in the same way a kid from Kentucky may say "why don't the Palestinians and Jews just get along ".

There's a whole history with parking here.

Yes, if our city was even one iota of a normal place we would expect these things. Instead we drop our pants and bend over because, well actually I don't know why we do, Stockholm syndrome?

I mean sure, but we're talking about a government agency that should theoretically answer to the people, whether through the democratic process, or (as in the article) eventually through the courts. Also as bad as they apparently are, I wouldn't think the parking deputies are holding a grudge against residents for filling the streets or something. Rather they're just motivated by money/expedience, and constrained by what they can get away with.

In Philly, residents can get permits to park near their home for an unlimited time. So you could leave for a week's vacation and have your car "courtesy towed" from right outside your house by the time you got back even with 72 hours notice.

The applications for those permits seem like an opportune time to collect an email/phone to send neighborhood notices to, and layout out expectations for the minimum time for those notices. I'm all for better ways of contacting vehicle owners. Posted notices are just a good first pass to contrast with the current insanity.

On-street parking is an absurd concept in itself. There are no other social equivalents where you can occupy a general public-use space for free (!) for several days (!) without facing some form of consequences.

The side of the street is hardly general public-use. In most places it's explicitly for parking. And many (certainly almost all where I am, albeit not in a major city) parking lots don't enforce time limits or ensure you're there for some specific use of the space.

That’s what happens in my area. Signs go up a week or so in advance saying you’ll be towed if parked there past date X.

The "posted signs" thing is an unimpressive solution in 2022 imho and they should really email you or text you "hey move your car please" etc.

As a thought experiment, imagine that the city government was motivated to find a car's owner for some reason, perhaps as a suspect or witness of a serious crime etc. Meaning if they have your plate number and think you're a murderer, they will definitely find you and communicate with you (the message that they communicate will be "come to the police station").

I claim this is a proof by construction that they could communicate with you by some method other than posted signs, if they actually wanted to. And they just choose to do the laziest possible "post signs" solution because of basically incompetence/laziness, not because there's no other way for them to identify and communicate with a car's owner.

How is the city supposed to know my cell phone number or email? I don't generally give them out. I give out my landline whenever I have to give out a phone number. And heck, there are plenty of people in a big city like Philly that don't have a cell phone, too. (And yes, some of them have cars, believe it or not.) Plus cell phones break, emails get sent to spam, etc. Putting a sign up at the place where you are likely to do the illegal thing seems pretty sensible to me.

> How is the city supposed to know my cell phone number or email?

My email's on file with the DMV; I get emails when my plates are due for renewal. Local law enforcement likely has access to that database.

And even if they don’t, the DMV could set up an API for local parking authorities that’s basically “send an email to the owner of this license plate”.

Well, they have owner of car and presumably where they live, they could send a snail mail at the very least

In my city at least the weekly street cleaning requires you to move your car weekly. So signs posted a week ahead are typically not as bad. Though the police did once us my apartment buzzer to tell me to move my car, it didn’t always happen (I’ve been towed twice in my 2 decades in the city)..

Also when they tow you it’s to a lot, they don’t just dump you on some other street like in Philly.

That said, it still seems helpful to know immediately as you're getting the space what the timeframe is for leaving. If the're going to start clearing the street in an hour, I'll probably park elsewhere right off the bat and not wait for an email.

This happened to me last year on my own property in my own parking space, and my landlord refused to tell me for weeks and weeks who towed my car, and then refused to pay the fee.

I want to sue (towing fees became larger than what I put into the car) but I have no idea how to proceed? I don't have a family to depend on for this kind of advice. The market has been so insane since that I still haven't purchased a new car.

Open to any advice about how to not let these bastards win. My car was straight stolen from my parking spot, with everything inside.

Call your state bar association and get a referral for a local attorney, a lot of state bar associations offer 30 minute consultations for >$50, and at the very least give you advise on how to proceed. A lot of times a demand letter sent from a lawyer is enough to get them to release the car and waive whatever bogus fees they're charging, and if not off to small claims court, where again they can advise you how to proceed or even handle it themselves if you'd like.

Thank you! I wish I'd received this advice when it happened. In general the state bar association is a good first-stop if I'm not sure what to do next in situations like this?

Absolutely, they can direct you to the right kind of lawyer for whatever situation you find yourself in, and honestly with something that's often incredibly location specific like parking and/or towing laws it's usually more than worth it to just get a professional involved instead of spending hours of your time researching and doing things yourself, when $100 for an hour of their time to draft and send a demand letter will accomplish the same thing.

If less than 20k, small claims court is usually your best avenue. Try to document as much as you can.

Maybe the spaces are posted as reserved, and "relocation towing" is what happens if you're still parked there at the reserved time.

In theory if the city had its act together and had a way to let you know where your car had been put (and a process to ensure it's not placed somewhere you'll get ticketed), this is a much fairer option than carting cars off to an impound lot, which are privately run and generally notoriously bad in terms of hours / fees / ease of retrieving your car.

> They should plaster the neighborhood in warning notices a month before the event, then go through again the night before to check for stragglers who'd forgotten.

Did they not do this?

Cities don't necessarily know if construction is going to happen a month in advance. Plans can change, so they have windows, sometimes decently large (months) windows to do the work.

Something similar happened to me where my car was towed to the yard (law says it should've been relocated iirc) for being parked in a construction zone while I was on vacation. When I got back I didn't check on my car for a few days and when I finally went to my car, I found it was towed and that I needed to pay $800 to get my car out. Thing is -- the permits for the construction on that day were canceled. So they did construction without a permit.

So when I attempted to contest it in court, I was pulled aside by the city's legal staff and told that they were throwing out the tickets, fines, and storage fees because they... didn't have enough information on the tickets. The judge signed the release and I had my car two hours later.

It's hard to give any ounce of good faith to these systems when they do things like not tell you they're throwing the tickets out before the court date, nor do they have any semblance of automation to find those sorts of ticket gaps. For me, I was able to take a couple days off of work to do research and go to court, but that's not the case for so many people.

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