It isn't every day the average citizen triumphs over an opponent with a badge and gun, so I begin this column with a hearty thanks to the Philadelphia Police Department for ordering cops to stop dumping their personal cars on sidewalks.
It's a small victory in a city full of bizarre and erratically enforced automotive regulations, but a win's a win. Best to savor the moment before you wind up in a parking kerfuffle like Peggy Stabert's.
Stabert has spent most of her 62 years on Earth in the city, but it took moving to Stone Harbor for her to encounter this doozy: In Philadelphia, it is illegal to park on the same block twice in one day.
I am not making this up. What you see as a driver's dream come true - finding a spot on a block with or without meters, not once but twice on the same errand-filled day! - the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) sees as a moneymaking opportunity.
Don't bother trying to find the specific statute behind the $36 ticket, unless you have hours to kill searching the city code. Besides, what's the point of knowing which ridiculous rule you inadvertently got caught breaking when you could just move your car to the median along South Broad Street and park with impunity?
Stabert drove her silver Honda CR-V from the Shore to Center City on Oct. 1 to finalize plans for her daughter's wedding. The mother-of-the-bride found a spot in the middle of the 2000 block of South Street, a two-hour, no-meter zone.
"I was in the spot for 30 minutes," Stabert recalled. "Then I left and drove to the Germantown Cricket Club."
Stabert returned to South Street around noon, giddily landing another spot at the far end of the same block, about six car lengths from where she had previously parked.
"I was there about an hour," she said. "When I came out and saw the ticket, I figured they'd made a mistake. They thought my car had been there the whole morning."
Stabert had lunch, then hustled over to the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication at Ninth and Filbert Streets for a walk-in hearing.
Stabert acknowledged that the "parking over time limit" ticket correctly said her Honda was observed at 10:09 a.m. and 12:19 p.m. But she pointed out that the vehicle was in two different spots at two different times, for a total of 90 minutes - well under the limit.
The hearing officer's reply? No dice. Tough luck. Stabert should have known better.
PPA spokeswoman Linda Miller told me the time-limit statute covers all street parking, but the PPA doesn't always catch people who hog metered spots or inch their way up and down the block.
"To be honest with you," she said, "we don't enforce it as long as there's money in the meter."
But on a block without meters, Stabert fell to the whim of an enforcement writer's written time log.
"There's no way of knowing you've come and gone," Miller argued. "They wouldn't know the car is in another spot."
Oddly, Stabert would have been fine if she had parked her car the second time in the same block but on the opposite side of the street.
Baffled, I turn to BAA director Clorise Wynn.
"The whole purpose of time limits is because we want every citizen to have the opportunity to park in every area," she explained. "If you're on the same side of the street on the same block, you really didn't move anywhere."
Wynn wasn't budging on the inherent lunacy of the policy, but she cut Stabert a break for ignorance: "She didn't understand, so I canceled her violation as a courtesy."
Stabert was grateful when I called with the good news, but mentioned that she's still out $36.
In her haste to get that walk-in hearing at Ninth and Filbert, she pulled up to a spot governed by one of those newfangled kiosks, got out, and marched inside without feeding the unfamiliar machine.
Returning defeated, she found another ticket on her dash - her second violation in six hours!
"That one," a sheepish Stabert admitted, "was entirely my fault." The check's in the mail.
Contact Monica Yant Kinney at myant@phillynews.com or 215-854-4670. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/yantkinney.
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