Yes, the Parking Authority is very tough and arrogant.
But there are two sides to the story.
Before the Parking Authority got reorganized into becoming a tough agency, parking was a big problem in the city. Phila has narrow streets and illegally parked cars badly foul up downtown traffic. People who paid $$$ to park legally in lots resented motorists who parked illegally and got away with it. Phila is on the border with NJ and NJ motorists got away with parking violations since they didn't follow up out of state.
First, they gave the PA computers to check for scofflaws. If someone had a long list of unpaid violations, their car was 'booted' and they had to pay up. They also agressively began towing illegally parked cars that blocked traffic and collecting fines from ticketed cars. People were brought in who owed thousands of dollars of unpaid fines.
All these efforts improved traffic flow and citizen morale.
This recent problem has them going too far. I have no problem aggressively collecting fines -- if it's done so promptly after the ticket is issued and regular notices are ignored. But to try to make up for 15 years of neglect using very fuzzy data base matches is wrong.
More importantly, this use of database matching to search out people or flag people is frightening. Is it fair for a completely innocent person to be denied credit, housing, or a job because some SECRET computer says he might be a deadbeat?
I still wonder if anyone can defend this sort of thing. I'm glad ABC News did an expose of the business, but I think that fell on deaf ears.
The quality of other govt Authorities varies by unit and also over time. We had one agency, the Delaware River Port Authority, that was well run. They built an excellent rapid transit line, PATCO-Lindenwold. That was the first automated trainsit line (before BART) and was well designed and very reliable. The designers knew automation wasn't perfect and put it full manual backup capability* as well as a strong organization and operation. Unfortunately, in recent years some local politicians got involved and turned the DRPA into a patronage machine.
*FWIW, PATCO was not high-tech or cutting edge. The designers just used proven off-the-shelf designs and put them all together. To save money, some components were actually second-hand. For instance, their internal telephone system was a used SxS. Every station had a Call-For-Aid telephone at the fare gates. If a passenger's ticket was short, the passenger would put coins directly into the phone -- they used 2nd hand pay phones as part of their network. Very cheap but workable solution still in use today. The train signal system used an old railroad 100Hz (that's one-hundred not one-thousand) code, not some fancy thing that other systems took years to debug. Pat, you may remember the auto faregates the Illinois Central commuter railroad used; PATCO copied those. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yes, I do remember the Illinois Central fare gates; one hassle (nothing major) was that the doors coming in to them from the tracks outside were used in common by passengers from the Illinois Central trains and the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad (hereinafter, the "South Shore" trains.) South Shore trains were also electrified, and run east across northern Indiana through Hammond/Gary on the southern shore of Lake Michigan over to South Bend, Indiana, splitting off from the Illinois Central 'mainline' tracks at 115th Street, onto their own tracks. North of that point, going into downtown Chicago, South Shore was a tenant, renting right of way on the Illinois Central tracks and at 'stations in common' which are/were Van Buren Street, Roosevelt Road, 57th Street, 63rd Street. Once they reached 115th Street they are on their own as their track cuts off and runs eastward. South Shore does not, or did not, use the automated fare collection system. You pay for your little stub ticket from an agent, board the train, and hand over your little stub when the conductor comes through the car.The hassle with that was Randolph Street where the automatic gates are located. The gates work both ways, to come out of the train area and to go into the train area. Illinois Central passengers use their little ticket slipped into the card reader on the gates. When a South Shore train pulled in, the clerks at the station level would see the mob of passengers coming; one of them would say 'on the gate' and by clicking on a wall switch, all the little turnstyles would go unlocked and stay unlocked for the three or five minutes required for the passengers to all be disengorged. Then to show that hands can be quicker than the eye, when the last passenger got through the gates, the clerk would hit the switch and cause the gates to go back in service again.
Where they had problems however was when two trains -- one a South Shore, the other an Illinois Central -- both pulled in at _exactly_ the same minute and the disembarking passengers from both trains were pushing and shoving each other as they marched toward the gates. When that happened, as it usually did at least once per day in the morning rush hour, the clerk had to simply open the gates and wound up writing off the uncollected mag stripe card deductions the railroad was due on the Illinois Central passengers. But as long as there was at least 45 seconds or a minute between incoming trains from one railroad or the other, as there usually was, those clerks at the gates were pretty fast and effecient at opening the gates only as needed for the minute or so required to let the South Shore people get through.
At the 'stations in common' the agents sold tickets for both railroads. There was a period of 2-3 days when the clerks union for Illinois Central went on strike for some reason, and they all walked off the job, all that is, except for the clerks on duty at the stations in common who were told by the union to stay on duty only to handle South Shore duties. Every other station was devoid of any workers those days. PAT]