Cracking Down on Parking Scofflaws

Due to all those recent stories about how much money the city is by not doing anything about enforcing parking laws (something for which SFist claims complete innocence of), the city is announcing steps to try and get more money out of parking.

First up, cracking down on handicap placards. Turns out those handicap placards are all the rage these days, as they seem to be everywhere. According to statistics, the amount of those handy-dandy blue signs has more than doubled in recent years and in San Francisco, the amount of handicap drivers out there is around 50,000. Now some of that might be because of the ever-increasing amount of senior citizens, but some of it is because healthy people are pretending to use handicap stickers to get handicap spots. We know, shocking. So the city is having people go out and check up on those people who are parking in handicap parking spots while using the placard. If they check out, they go away free. If they don't check out, meaning there's no record of them anywhere, they get a ticket.

Hmmm...note to self: start setting up fake handicap placard business.

Next up, increasing the fines for parking in the blue zone by a $100 bucks, thus making the fine for doing so $350. Money collected in the fines will be used to help crack down on healthy people who use the handicap placards. It's like killing two parking birds with one stone.