Parking: tickets for Quotas & shady car rental companies
Sometimes we feel as if some parking enforcement officers gives unnecessary parking tickets. Is it to keep the community safer or is it because they have a quota to make? and why is it that when you rent a car, you have to accept the terms that this rental company could charge your credit card for any tolls or tickets? Some might even say that there is something shady going on between some rental companies and the parking enforcement agencies.
We first found out about this when we were looking at the LA market. We saw that many people have complains about getting tickets for no reason. We started to look for irregularities and found lots of people with similar stories.
Let’s be clear that the Quotas are not determined, but encouraged to the fact that the funds collected helps cover some of the departments overtime costs.
And here is how the officers have reacted to it:
“I don’t think it’s fair,” said Katie Donahue, one of the drivers who received a bogus ticket. “They’re preying on the citizens’ lack of knowledge about this.”
Garcetti weighed in on the investigation and wasn’t happy:
“Well, that is absolutely unacceptable. I can’t tell you how upset I was to hear that and, thanks to your reporting, people who got those tickets are going to get a refund, and it’s going to stop. Period.”
It is true that parking tickets and meters are an important source of revenue for cities. Let’s take SF, Oakland and Berkeley.
There’s even been a testimony of an ex traffic officer admitting this practice:
“When they’re paying you time-and-a-half, they want to see a minimum of eight tickets,”
How does this connect to rental companies and parking tickets? Well, as you know, when you rent a car, you leave your credit card and accept that the rental company can charge you later for tolls or tickets. As we can read in this Quora article:
All the major rental companies have departments setup to handle this or outsource this task to other companies who are quite good at collecting the fines. It’s actually a revenue source as well as an expense management issue for the rental companies, so they take it seriously.
Here you can read some testimonials
But the shady situations not only happens with receiving parking tickets but also when the rental car companies need to manage the toll you hadn’t paid. As they mention in this article, the car rental companies make a ton of money out of this fees.
The phantom toll charges have been nickel-and-diming travelers a lot, lately, as states, counties, cities and even airports opt for cost-saving e-toll systems. The charges are vaguely disclosed in the fine print of the rental car agreement, but that hasn’t stopped the consumer outrage.
We even found companies that works with the ticket collection agencies; making it easier for the government and the rental companies to collect this revenue. On who’s shoulders this ends up? In the customers, in the people.
“Our company contracts with the auto rental company to process, pay and bill violations. We take the whole department out of the hands of the auto rental company,”
As we go deeper into parking market, we have found that cities, enforcement officers, car rental companies, and collection agencies interests sometimes conflicts with the interest and better experience of the general public.
Here at Fleck, we are trying to lessen bad experiences such as getting your car towed or receiving unnecessary parking tickets. Park/rent someone else driveway or garage and forget about stress, anxious, nervous, angry or any negative feeling about the experience. Enjoy your commute.
