One year ago this week New York City eliminated the plea bargaining parking tickets. The city believed that this move would generate additional parking ticket revenue. Our review of the city’s budget forecasts indicates that the city was correct in their assumption. In FY2011 the city collected $523,500,000 in parking ticket fines while in FY2012 (ending June 30, 2012) the city collected $548,500,000 in parking ticket revenue. The city forecasts that they will write $547,600,000 in parking tickets in the current fiscal year (2013). Many of the parking violations written by traffic agents contain defects. NYC Ticket Fighter has spent years scrutinizing parking tickets for defects that would require a judge to dismiss the ticket. (For the related news story see CBS News).
On the commercial side of parking tickets, the “Plea Bargain” program is still in effect for commercial vehicles. The city controller, John Liu, recently discovered that there are millions of dollars of uncollected judgment debt on the books, that the city has failed to collect. Since plea bargains are available for companies, shouldn’t they be available for individuals? I believe this is unfair. Commercial vehicles abuse the programs by parking in amenable areas in excess of time allowed, and when not actually loading and unloading. The commercial program is overdue for some serious scrutiny. They eliminated the program for the wrong people.
Our company has helped both consumers and business fight defective parking tickets since 1989. We encourage commercial fleets to contact us to learn more about how we help you reduce your parking ticket expense in New York City.