A guy I know was in a shopping mall parking lot one day when a truck whipped into a handicapped stall.
No wheelchair decal in the window. No pass dangling from the rear-view mirror. The driver just hopped out and headed for the stores.
“Excuse me,” said my guy.
“Do you know you’re in a handicapped spot?”
The driver — who resembled a rabid pit bull, only without the charm — glared and replied: “What are you going to do about it?”
“Good question,” thought my guy, who waited until the driver disappeared inside the mall before letting the air out of all four tires.
It takes a special kind of self-entitled weasel to park in a handicapped spot, a level of scumbaggery somewhere between that of Rob Ford and Donald Sterling.
Still, people do it. The City of Victoria ticketed drivers for doing so 643 times last year, up from 620 in 2012. The fine is $130 if paid within two weeks, $150 after that. The charge in a Robbins Parking lot is $59, or $32 if paid within three days. I believe the offenders also burn for eternal damnation, though that may just be wishful thinking.
Alas, while violators risk the wrath of the parking police on city streets or private pay lots, the sad truth is drivers who flout the rules elsewhere are often restrained by nothing more than the boundaries of social acceptability.
It’s not just the handicapped-spot abusers who escape parking lot justice, either. Lesser criminals abound.
There’s the guy in the pickup truck who tries squeezing into a small-car spot. There’s the one who angle-parks across two spots because his car is sooooo much nicer than yours and deserves the extra protection from door dings. Most common are those offenders who simply can’t stay within the lines, their wheels encroaching on the neighbouring space like Russia helping itself to a slice of Ukraine. (Putin parkers, as it were.)
All these outlaws have been able to lead their Bonnie and Clyde lives with impunity — until now.
Now, they are subject to vigilante justice, to being outed in public by the emergence of apps and websites dedicated to the social shaming of bad drivers.
Here in the capital, people have begun posting photos of badly positioned cars to a Facebook page called S--- Parkers of Victoria. Going by the pictures — a selection of vehicles that appear to have been parked by an earthquake — people in rule-bound Bureaucracy-by-the-Water suddenly turn rogue when behind the wheel.
Similarly, there’s a Twitter account called YYJ Drivers that urges Victorians to submit “plate numbers, vehicle descriptions and pics of idiot drivers.” Its collection includes a photo of a Canada Post van blocking a homeowner’s driveway, plus YouTube clips of a stupid-fast speeding motorcycle on the Pat Bay, other highway motorists shortcutting down the shoulder and some bozo passing other cars in a turn lane onto Vernon Avenue.
There are also websites like baddriving.ca, whose assortment of videos includes several of Victorians behaving badly.
It’s not just local, of course. From Australia’s Melbourne Crap Parkers to Kazakhstan’s I Parked Like an Ass, similar sites abound.
Others take bolder measures: In Russia, vigilantes have been plastering the windshields of illegally parked cars with giant stickers. In Poland, the stickers are smaller but carry a depiction of a penis.
The New York Times reported last year that a non-profit group called Parking Ability is developing an app that would allow smartphone users to report to the authorities those who park in handicapped spots. A Winnipeg startup was also working on an app that would see complainants earn a portion of any resulting fine levied on the parker.
Not everyone is comfortable using a smartphone to narc on the neighbours. Some think publicly shaming/burning at the stake a driver who takes up two spaces is a wee bit of an overreaction, seeing as no actual Criminal Code laws have been broken.
But these drivers are the same people who break the nine-items-or-fewer rule at the grocery store or try butting in at the ferry terminal. They upset the social order. Next thing you know, the streets will be filled with roaming gangs of feral youth and Victoria will descend to a level of anarchy that has Somali pirates gasping in dismay. Think Yeats: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
Well, no, but anyone who hijacks a handicapped spot is a weasel.
