Just $15 For Being A Dangerous, Disrespectful and Dumb Driver?

Late on Sunday morning on Columbia Street, next to the 7th Street Park:  Two consecutive parking spaces are occupied by cars, both with New Jersey license plates, facing in the wrong direction/parked on the wrong side of the road/left wheels at the curb (not a too surprising sight in Hudson).  No one is inside either vehicle.  I call HPD to alert them.

5 minutes later, I notice the driver of the leading car getting into her car.  The driver of a car headed west on Columbia sees the same thing and senses a parking space coming available.  The driver immediately pulls up besides the other illegally parked car, waiting for the first car to exit the coveted space.  For at least 30 seconds, traffic on Columbia headed east had to swerve into the opposite traffic lane to avoid a car stopped in their lane waiting to take the place of an illegally parked car on the wrong side of the road.  

The Jersey car leaves its space and immediately turns left onto 7th Street without incident.  The driver of the waiting car, seemingly not concerned with being in the wrong lane of traffic for half a minute, pulls into the freshly vacated space.  The vehicle has North Carolina plates. Two women get out and walk directly to Warren Street, past the coffee shop on Park Place which I presumed they were headed to.

3 minutes later, HPD Officer Dunham arrives by vehicle, issuing a pair of $15 WRONG SIDE PARKING tickets to the cars.  This is the same type of ticket most of us are all too familiar with (and loathe) for failing to park on the correct side of the street overnight.  Yes, that same ticket!  Certainly the two offenses are very different, though, aren't they?

Officer Dunham agrees with me that parking in the wrong direction after crossing into the other lane of traffic should cost a driver more than $15.  

Parking with a vehicle's left wheels at the curb on a two-way street is certainly more dangerous, troubling and inexcusable than forgetting or failing to park one's car on the other side of the street at night so the street sweeper can do its thing.  So why is there no distinction between the two offenses, both nominally and by dollar amount? Whichever side of the street we residents happen to park our cars overnight, at least we aren't parking them headed in the wrong friggin' direction as if it didn't matter.

Perhaps if the ticket for parking in the wrong direction/on the wrong side were $50 instead of $15, this dangerous and unwelcome practice wouldn't be so ridiculously common in Hudson.  Or maybe it wouldn't have any effect, but at least the ticket price would more appropriately reflect the infraction, and the city would be richer for it.