NYC "NIGHT REGULATIONS" Parking Ticket SCAM! 9

Yeah, sorry about that, I couldn't resist with a name like that. :-D

(If it makes you feel any better, I've been staying in Teabag, New Jersey, which is right next to Wackensack and not far from, this one needs no alteration, Little Ferry.)

I kind of like the smug "What the hell do you think you're doing?" approach as opposed to the smug "Good evening, sir" approach. Rage may not be professional, but at least it's honest. Actually, I find that you do have to behave remarkably stupid to be pulled over in NYC. They seem quite fair with moving violations. It's parking violations where they're obnoxious, again, because the decent cops probably won't be the ones signing traffic tickets. If they're yelling like that at drunks and drag racers, good for them. People who act *that* stupid deserve it.

I was in the car with a girl once, and she turned the wrong way down a one-way street in Lower Manhattan. We got pulled over, and the cop started screaming at her. I thought we were royally screwed (we were borrowing the car and the registration was expired), until he said, "...so turn around, and don't let that happen again!"

Similar things have happened to me plenty of times, though never major violations like that. I once was driving at night up First Avenue without my lights on. I always have my lights on because it's actually safer even during the day, but some work had been done on my car that day, and the shop turned them off, and I forgot to check to make sure they were on. I was pulled over, told them what happened, and they were quite understanding about it. (I don't know about NY, but where I learned to drive, having your lights off at night while moving was a serious violation.)

I'm far fromunfamiliar with the west coast, but as for the California Highway Patrol, I never had a run-in with them, but I find state police are almost always the most professional everywhere I go. I'm really a pretty safe driver, and never had serious problems, except when I was in high school with the local town cops (and hey, I probably wasn't the best driver back then). But local California cops also were, to put it nicely, quite bad it seemed from my limited experience (only a few cases where I was a pbuttenger). I never got ticketed out there, but some middle-of-nowhere town in northern California really gave my aunt an unfair hbuttle with me in the car. Yeah, sure, we got the smug "good evening, ma'am," and then a ticket for having the gall to make it through an orange light.

(To NYC's credit, they actually seem to ignore violations ON CAMERA when you don't quite make it before going red. I've been caught doing that plenty of times downtown, and never got mailed anything.)