Tickets are no fun. Even if you are out having fun a good solid costly parking ticket can taint the evening. When I was living in Wisconsin, parking in a parking ramp could sometimes be more expensive than a ticket out on the street, so taking your chances was often the most fiscally responsible choice. That is definitely not the case in New York City. Take the following example:
Appleton has basically two parking ramps and a number of coin opperated street parking locations. The ramps cost a few bucks to park in, and a quarter on the street will get you like, 15 minutes, but most importantly the parking ticket only costs $5 (the last time I got one.)
Now, let's talk about New York City. Average parking ramp seems to be around $30 +/- $10 for a few hours of parking. Coin Ops are out there, but as I have learned, they are really just for suckers. By that I mean, if you are enough of a magician to be able to plug the meeter with enough change to generate enough time to actually go do something and correctly estimate how soon you will get back to your car... well, then you are fine. But in my case, I put about $0.75 in the coin op and that gave me a foolish 30 minutes in the financial district one saturday morning. I thought to myself, "What an amazing deal," until 35 minutes later I was walking up to my car noticing that the additional poorly estimated 5 minutes cost me an addition $65, for a grand total of $65.75 to park downtown for 35 minutes. At that point I seriously contemplates consulting a cop to see if I now had paid for hte right to live in that spot the remainder of the day. Rather, I got in my car and drove up by Columbia University to hang out with friends (did I mention I drove around for about 20 minutes to find the right best spot this time?)
Ugh! Never again. So, thanks to NYC and the NYC.gov website, I was conveniently able to pay the unexpected expense online, which leaves me with this beatifully designed momento in viewable form in the top most picture of this blog entry. But this brings me to my final comment on this most interesting experience: paying your parking tickets online!
So, there was this goofy moment after I located my online ticket on the website. The page asked me if I wanted to "add anything else to my basket" -- as in Shopping basket? I figured they were using some cheap e-commerce software and someone simply neglected to rework those interfaces so they would say something more appropriate, like "Do you want to pay another ticket?" or "would you like to add to you credit for future parking violations?" ... you know, something more helpful, like that. But they obviously didn't take the time, nor were they likely too worried about my "user experience" when paying my parking ticket. Finally, once I was certain I didn't want to add anything to my "basket" it asked me if I was "ready to checkout"...
...
... to which my reply could only be, "Yes. I am all stocked up on parking tickets and am not in need of another thing. Thanks for asking. Let's ... checkout!"
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