Parking Tickets: Just Another Way to Rip Us Off

You wake up in the morning to the awful, shrill sound of your alarm clock, and you quickly slap on the snooze. You tell yourself you’re only going to close your eyes for another 2 minutes, and the next thing you know your alarm is going off again and you’ve been sleeping for 20 minutes. So you rush to get ready, stubbing your toe in the process. You run out to your car, slipping on ice and spilling your coffee all over your new white t-shirt. So you run back inside to change, growling to yourself along the way, and rush back out to your car. Despite your best efforts, you walk in late to class. You feel 100 eyes burning into you as you make your way to the back of the room, and take the only empty seat left. The guy you sit next to feels the need to talk to you and tell you his life story while you are attempting to pay attention and he just HAPPENS to have the worst breath you’ve ever smelt. I’m talking the kind that just lingers in the air and smells like rotting flesh, onions, and dog poop combined. Just your luck right? You’re thinking that nothing else could possibly go wrong, until you make it to your car at the end of your already long and miserable day. Sitting on your windshield, nicely tucked under your wipers, is a lime green envelope. You scoop it up and open it to find an $8 fine for parking too close to a crosswalk.

Really? A ticket for parking too close to a crosswalk? The curbs are covered in snow, so how the hell are you to know you aren’t supposed to park there? There aren’t any signs, nor are there any fire hydrants or anything around so it looked like a legit space to you. What harm are you causing by parking too close to a crosswalk? Like seriously; it’s just another way for the city to make money. La Crosse makes about $200,000 a year in parking tickets alone! And what are they doing with that money? They use it to pay the jerks that run around, slapping tickets on everyone and anyone’s cars for any particular reason they can think up at the time. RIDICULOUS. And paying for the tickets; extra ridiculous. You can’t mail in cash payments, so you can either waste a check (to write out a lousy $8), pay online and get charged an additional $3 (total bull****) or drive to the police station and pay at the counter. However, you can’t park in the parking lot or you’ll get yet another ticket, so you have to park on the street and walk a block or two to get there. Don’t be surprised if there is yet another ticket, for some ridiculous reason, on your windshield when you return to your vehicle. They hand those babies out like candy. My suggestion to future students, pay the $77 for a parking permit. By the end of the semester, you’ll have paid double that from all the parking tickets you’ll acquire.