The Allentown Morning Call talks about how an Allentown woman got labeled a scofflaw in the City of Philadelphia. It seems that parking enforcement officers (a.k.a. meter maids) have problems with dyslexia:
”What is probably happening is that the ticket writer is transposing the H and the M characters because they are next to each other and they are shaped the same,” Martinko, a 19-year veteran, wrote in an e-mail. ”I have done this when running license plates on my in-car computer.”
Going on that hunch, Martinko ran a slight variation of Hersch’s license plate: GMH-7177. Sure enough, that plate traced to an Oldsmobile registered to an owner who lives in the neighborhood where the tickets were issued.
A transposition error sounds like a reasonable explanation, said Linda Miller, the parking authority’s deputy executive director. It’s one of the first explanations the parking authority looks at when someone contests a ticket.
”Unfortunately, when you have someone keying in or writing a plate, they sometimes make mistakes,” Miller said.
Mistakes are understandable, but it shouldn’t take six months to fix the problem. I had a friend who got nabbed by the PPA for having an unregistered vehicle on city streets even though the car had valid and current Iowa tags and registration on it. When she contested it, PPA claimed the plate was stolen. There are reasons why the city’s tax base has been eroding steadily for decades; it’s not a nice place to live. The government is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent, the taxes are horrible, and the only people who live there tend to do so out of neccessity rather than choice.
