Each day in the city of Athens, almost 100 drivers return to parked cars to find ticketed fines adorning their windshields.
Between four parking enforcement officers and other city employees, Athens Police Department officials wrote 25,699 parking tickets in 2012, generating more than $360,000 in revenue.
Athens handed out many more parking tickets than Oxford, Bowling Green and Kent in 2012, despite having a lower population than Bowling Green and Kent.
The Oxford Police Department and the Bowling Green Police Department issued 16,835 and 15,925 parking tickets, respectively, in 2012. The Kent Police Department reported 2,546 parking tickets in 2012.
Much of the disparity between ticket numbers is because of Athens’ citywide 24-hour parking limitation — a law that was broken 3,088 times in 2012, said Mayor Paul Wiehl.
The law, which is not present in Kent or Oxford, maintains reliable parking spots for homeowners that would otherwise be occupied by car storage, Wiehl said.
Despite the thousands of 24-hour parking tickets, expired parking meter violations in the Uptown area were the most common offense in 2012. This past year, APD officers issued 14,456 tickets to car owners who didn’t feed the meter.
APD officers have a particularly strict enforcement of the 10-hour parking meters in the city parking garage, said Jennifer McClain-Eskey, parking enforcement officer. She added that parking enforcement officers patrol the garage twice as many times as they do the street meters.
“The fact that our parking garage is metered (increases the number of tickets),” McClain-Eskey said. “There are not a lot of parking garages that are metered, because most are controlled by tenants.”
McClain-Eskey — who received enough parking tickets while attending Ohio University to prompt the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to freeze her license — said she thinks the majority of ticket violators are OU students.
Having three outstanding parking tickets results in a license freeze.
Since the change to semesters, though, McClain-Eskey said there has been a drop in two-hour meter violations.
“When OU switched to semesters, it was a sigh of relief,” she said. “Now that school is on semesters and they have changed the timing of classes, I have seen a drastic drop in two-hour parking tickets.”
Avoiding tickets, though, is still a difficult task for OU students, said Alessa Rosa, a freshman studying strategic communications who received a fine for parking on Mill Street in March.
“It’s a pain to change your parking spot (every 24 hours),” Rosa said. “I would never bring my car here unless I had my own parking spot.”
sh335311@ohiou.edu
