Victory tastes like dark chocolate truffle with hazelnut.

Back in December, I went to a Christmas party in Chinatown.  One of the buses stops right by our house on the way to the train station, so I figured I'd hop on around 8:45 and be fashionably late downtown.

Well, I missed that bus.  Realized I was walking out the door empty-handed, so in the time it took me to dig through the closet for a bottle of vino and get downstairs, the bus had come and gone. 

I resigned myself to waiting another 50 minutes for the next one.  Not really a big deal when you can do that in your living room.  When I went back outside and climbed the hill to another bus route, I noticed about seven tow trucks hooking up cars that seemed to be parked perfectly legally.  Fearing for the Volvo, I called the Girl -- she checked the Somerville webpage and, lo and behold, a snow emergency had been declared, effective 9:00pm, and despite a complete absence of street signage to communicate this information, parking on the even-numbered side of the street had been banned.  (There's not so much as a single "No parking during a snow emergency" sign to be found.  How you're supposed to be aware of this procedure, I have no idea.)

The Girl came down with the keys and we hopped in the car and drove around a bit, looking for a spot.  Found one about a block down, where a one-way road intersects with our street.  There wasn't a "No Parking From Here to Corner" sign posted on the last light pole, which had only a street cleaning sign attached to it, so I assumed we were good for the night.

Imagine my surprise when I dug the car out the next morning and found a blazingly orange ticket peaking out of the snow drift next to the front tire.  I picked it up, half hoping it had blown off someone else's ride -- until I saw our license plate number scrawled along the bottom.

According to the esteemed officer, we had parked within 10 feet of a fire hydrant.  A $100 violation.

@#$%^&*!

I looked around, not a fire hydrant on the street to be seen.  What the hell?  

This is about the time the GIrl came down to help dig out the car. And that's when I spotted it -- turning back, I noticed a blocky red knob up the one-way road that intersected with the street.  The Girl was rapidly dispatched to get the camera and a tape measure.

Ten feet my ass.  We were a full 23 feet and 7 inches from the nearest hydrant, which wasn't even on the street I had parked on.  I mean, I could maybe understand if we had parked, say, 11 or 12 feet away.  But 23 is very obviously to the naked eye not 10.   (I measure distances using the Girl as a unit of measurement -- at 5 feet tall, she makes guessing a tidy affair -- and we were clearly over four Girls away from the hydrant.)  So either the cop was drunk or he was just being an ass.

Or both.

We snapped a photo and filed a sharply-worded appeal online.  The grudging response from the Traffic and Regulations Office was exactly what I expected; I'm thinking about framing the administrative dismissal as my first win as a solo practicioner.

Comments

[Mom]

You "done good"...proud of you! One CAN fight City Hall and WIN:-)
Love you every day!!!

[the sister]

niiiice!

[theotherlion]

I love it! That is ridiculous. And speaking of snow routes, there is NOWHERE to park at my work when it snows (no parking 2 inches or more until it's plowed). I hate it I hate it I hate it.

I hope everyone who got towed filed an appeal for the lack of signage.