Philly pays $30K to two 'courtesy' tow victims, but class-action suit continues

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?!"

It could be the argument for a sitcom. Not funny in real life when police is pointing a gun at you.

They could do vastly better than the status quo with century-old multi-part paper form technology. "White Copy - Central PD Tow Office", "Yellow Copy - Precinct PD Tow Clerk", "Pink Copy - DMV, to mail to vehicle owner", ...

This kind of worse-than-brain-dead sh*t-show is why so many people emotionally identify with "the government is the problem", "de-fund the police", and similar slogans.

15k is a ton for many people and probably well more than the inconvenience this one guy suffered.

But it's insubstantial compared to the cost of this case turning into a class action and getting the city to actually have to change something, and it sounds like it's insubstantial compared to the total harm of this program. Especially cases like the woman who was nearly arrested.

If the local government can’t afford to tow cars to an impound lot and pay those fees, then they can’t afford to have local events. This is simply a case of having your cake and eating it too. Local government wants all the benefits of having events with none of the negatives (like actually planning and being responsible).

I actually don’t understand why there is no system where a note is issued by the tower that informs whoever that this car was moved as part of a courtesy tow and it is not subject to fines. I don’t mean a centralised system, I mean a sticker you can just bang on there. There should also be an option where you could call the DMV and they can “page” the owner to advise them were their car is located if someone is being inconvenienced by an unwanted car that has been towed.

There are so many simple options that won’t fix the issue but at least prevent it from being hellish. The fact that nothing has been done makes me feel like this is actually quite intentional on part of the parking authority for revenue reasons.

I grew up in NYC, and have a certain immunity to deal with aloof, hostile or otherwise obnoxious city officials. I’ve been to Philly on business and pleasure a few times and… forget it, it’s a whole other level. One wedding, literally 30% of the guest had a ticket, tow or other drama.

Life is too short. Philly makes Jersey look good.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

We called Enterprise who said the car had been properly returned by the previous customer days before, so it should be there. They paid for us to get an Uber to another available car, so we were only delayed and hour or so.

They did follow up with us and it turned out that the city had done a "courtesy tow" because the car was parked on a parade route the previous day. I'm not sure how they eventually found it, but they said that they couldn't activate the GPS tracking without delay and lots of approvals because of customer privacy issues.

And dropping the cars off in illegal spots, well the fine should go to the “driver” not the car.

I guess they are too lazy to change this or it is profiting someone personally?

There were "No Parking xxxday for repaving" that were posted in the (somewhat desolate, few residences) area after I have parked. Even after explaining this situation to the operators, they still insisted that the city must have towed my car because I did not pay my parking tickets. Three/four operators, same line. They had no idea where they towed my car. It took my father and I over an hour, splitting the streets, walking the neighborhood and finding the car.

The thing is that you have to pay the ticket, then fight it once (they automatically vote against you), then you appeal it, where they take a closer look at things, and then pass judgement in my favor. At times, I'm out hundreds of dollars and it takes 3-6 months for it to all resolve itself.

I'm tired of it.

London has a centralised system where you can check if your vehicle has been removed to a pound/relocated:

https://trace.london/

> Problem is, the city doesn’t have a modern, reliable way to track the vehicles’ new locations, leaving owners wandering the streets for days or weeks, looking for their cars.

This would normally be the part where I (and probably half the other people reading HN) would say that building a modern, reliable way to track this is not hard. We'd go on to outline something involving a database, probably a mobile app for the tow truck drivers, and probably a web site for car owners. We'd probably say this is a small project that could be done by a handful of developers in a few weeks and would be fairly inexpensive.

Others would then tell us that we are vastly underestimating the difficulties of dealing with the mess that city IT tends to be, and that "fairly inexpensive" would still be expensive enough that there would have to be budget meetings and studies, and maybe the web site would need to support multiple languages, and a ton of other things we've overlooked.

So I'm not going to suggest that a modern, reliable way to track this would be easy.

But why does it have to be modern? What would be wrong with an old-fashioned approach?

Require the tow truck drivers to report the license plate numbers and drop off locations and drop off date/time to the police or perhaps some other government entity which can add the information to a list.

When an owner finds their car missing and contacts the police, the police can check the list and tell the owner where the car is and remove it from that list, and add it to a log of past courtesy tows along with a timestamp.

If the owner finds that their car got ticketed at the new location before they could reasonably retrieve it the log of past courtesy tows could be used to prove that the owner did not park at the new location.

This requires:

1. Tow truck drivers have a way to report the information. Voice or text from their cell phone to a phone number maintained by the police specifically for this would cover that.

2. The police need to maintain a list of these reports. This can be handled by having them copy the information to an index card and file the card alphabetically by license number in a card file.

3. Car owners or police called by car owners need a way to check the list. They can call the same number from #1, and the people that file incoming reports can also handle checking the card file.

4. The police needs to maintain the log. That's another, bigger, card file.

So basically we need a phone line, someone who will answer that phone, a file clerk with enough time to handle these, enough card files to hold the recent records, probably a shelf or two in an office to hold those card files, and a bigger card storage system for the historical log.