Thursday, October 30, 2008

Passaic, New Jersey, Stands Up To Aggressive Towing

Flickr.com photo

Appalling stories of aggressive towing have led the city of Passaic, New Jersey to increase the price of parking tickets, but (quite sensibly) refrain from towing vehicles during street cleaning days, according to North Jersey Dot Com.

City drivers are...

...reportedly "applauding" the new system, where fines for parking go from $37 to $74, still much cheaper than getting towed.

Notably, the difficulties citizens have in Passaic seem to revolve more around TIME than MONEY, since the inefficient retrieval process takes many hours and some people are forced to take off the whole day. Councilman Chaim Munk helped lead the reform, and so gets a positive mention from this blog. Oily thumbs up to ya, Chaim!

These imperfect but positive reforms are the result of hundreds of residents in the city's Third Ward signing a petition against aggressive towing after the city changed parking rules to clean streets and keep storm drains free of debris.

The aggressive towing company which helped cause all the trouble--Raineri's Towing Company--wasn't commenting for North Jersey Dot Com. No surprise there.

Passaic, New Jersey proves that a petition with just a few hundred signatures can actually lead to positive towing reforms. Be inspired, citizens. Be very inspired.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

the city designs the specs. so that raineri is the only one who qualifies for the contract, based on square footage of space for the lots. they've been doing that for about 2 decades.

Johnny T. Utopia said...

Interesting. Can you tell me anything else?