Keeping the street clear.

7/21/09, 4:10 pm. Our city hard at work keeping the street clear for rush hour traffic. You can see a second tow truck in the second picture. Keepin' that traffic movin'. The meter reader is still sitting there (blocking traffic) waiting to see the fine work of the tow trucks.

Plaid Nation

Watched this vehicle pull up and read the parking sign. Might be the first time I've ever seen anyone do that. They then sped off which is why the pic is so blurry. I hardly had any time to take the picture. So I went online to see who Plaid Nation is and they are apparently touring the midwest. They have a Twitter column and in their posted tweets they had already received their first parking ticket in Milwaukee despite having only been here a few hours. I still don't know what Plaid Nation is, though I do like plaid.

Lane change

The city wants to keep the parking lane open during the hours of 3:30 to 5:30. So what they do is ticket anyone who is parked there. In order to accomplish this they block all 3 lanes of traffic. This is last night at 4:10, not a lot different from any night. 6 cars had been ticketed earlier. In the third picture you can see the owner of the car. In the last picture she is pleading with the meter reader. I do not know if she was successful. I left after 10 minutes of watching this. Obviously all 3 lanes were blocked that entire time. So that's good.

Conundrum

I'm not sure how to think about this. First is the issue of the woman parked in 2 spots, a phenomenon that is quite common. I've not seen anyone get a ticket for this, or at least I'm unaware if that happens. Then there is the utterly random parking job of the bikers. It seems not quite right that they are parked in the formation they've chosen. Half in and half out, right on the line and then into the loading zone. It's 3:06, I will be interested to see how confusing this might be for the meter reader.

Miracle of miracles

Thursday 4 pm. The street is clear. This may have something to do with the immense "No Parking" sign that is hanging over the regular sign, though that is actually for Saturday morning or it may have something to do with the 3 cars they'd already towed. But I have to say, I think this is the first time I've seen the street clear since I became aware of this miserable business several years ago.

Not that people don't deserve tickets.

This woman parked in 2 spots and left her car. She deserved the ticket she got. I hope she got a ticket for both of them. On the downside though, she got her ticket at 3:34. Bummer.

View from the kiosk

Standing at the payment kiosk which tells you absolutely nothing, if you looked up the street to find a sign, this is what your view would be. Barely visible and not a thing that says you'll be towed. View north - nothing. View south - just about nothing.

At least there's a sign

Too bad it's facing east. When you're standing at the payment kiosk, there are 2 signs you could possibly see. Unfortunately one is facing away from you to the north and the other is facing east and so are you. There is nothing that says tow-away zone.

30 Minutes

I leave work at 4 which means I only see one half hour of tickets. These are just 2 photographs. There were at least 10 $50 tickets given out in 30 minutes. The third picture is a gratuitous picture of a guy begging to no avail, of course.

These 4 cars are getting tickets, it is 3:34.

Then as I was leaving, I took the second picture. 2 more cars had joined the mess.