(Long Island, NY) I hung up the phone feeling worn out, after having a long conversation with a good friend of mine about a nightmarish ordeal she had when her car was towed away.
She lives in Chicago, where an army of tow truck drivers lie in wait for innocent motorists to make one wrong move when parking. Then they swoop in for the kill, hauling your car off to god knows where. You wouldn’t even know what happened to your vehicle until you tried to report it stolen.
It happened to me once, on a trip to see friends in a nearby suburb. I took my rental car downtown and found what I thought was an unbelievable parking spot. I went to Michigan Avenue, did some shopping, and came back to find my car gone.
My friend and I did the same thing–we first assumed we had just forgotten where we originally parked. Then we panicked and called the cops. “Your car probably hasn’t been stolen. Call (this special number) and check. If they don’t know where your car is, call us back.
In both cases, the car had been towed.
In Chicago when you get to the impound lot, you can be shuttled back and forth between the same two customer service windows at least seven times. In my friend’s case, she was finally able to retrieve her car after paying an impound fee. She was shown to a huge lot of cars in various stages of abuse, and told it was “against the back fence, the 69th car down.”
They turned her loose all alone in the huge lot to find the car. When she managed to locate it, covered in mud and ready to throttle someone, it was time for the next stage of the ordeal.
The towing company managed to ruin her brakes. The car was undriveable. Another long trudge through the muddy, potholed impound yard to complain. “Oh, you’ll need to make a claim for the damages. You’ll need to get three estimates and submit paperwork.”
Three estimates? That means three tow trucks, three towing fees, and at least a week without a car. Ridiculous.
In the end, with the impound fees, the tickets, and the repairs to her brakes, my friend told me her ordeal cost nearly five hundred dollars.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know how much sympathy you’re going to get from a bunch of New Yorkers on this one, but I for one think the whole system stinks. Everybody knows it’s a racket, but as long as we’re dependent on the automobile they–that’s the government ‘they’– will find a way to tax us for it. And the whole ticket systme is just an extended, punitive taxation scheme, in my humble and probably-not-so-politically-accurate opinion.
I don’t want to sound dismissive of environmental issues here, but forget global warming; I’m tempted to get rid of my car on the strength of the tickets, the fees, the tolls, the taxes, and all the rest alone.
I’d switch to a bicycle tomorrow, but I know for certain if it ever caught on in a major way, they’d find a way to slap a boot on a bike tire in no time at all.
