Traffic Tickets Can Turn Up in The Oddest Places

We’ve all tried to avoid them. We’ve all received them. We’ve all thought that in some instances they were unfair.

Parking tickets: a bane of western civilization.

With so many vehicles on the road and so few places to park, it’s a wonder that tickets are not issued more often than they actually are. But in some instances, traffic tickets issued seem a bit extreme. What follows are the tales of a few rather unusual citations received.

For instance, how many people bother to pay parking tickets 60 years late? One man in Nebraska did. In 1954, a woman received a parking ticket. Almost 60 years later, her son found it, and noting that she mostly likely had forgotten she had received it, paid the fine on her behalf. The cost of the fine? Ten cents.

Would you hide under a bus to avoid a traffic ticket? That’s what a bus driver in China did after the police chased him down for two moving violations. He got out from behind the wheel and hid under his bus. When the police called a towing company to remove the bus, the man slid along under the vehicle as it was towed away. Now that’s going to extremes to avoid being handed a citation.

A woman in Sicily, Italy, might receive the record for most expensive parking ticket ever. According to the ticket, she was fined 32,000 euros (about $44,500) for parking her car illegally since “208 A.D.” The cop who issued the ticket had meant to write 2008, but missed the correct date by a few thousand years — resulting in an even larger fine.

In the United States, a pedestrian who is struck by a car usually has the upper hand in any legal proceedings. Not so in England. A man was hit by a police car and suffered a broken foot. To show their sympathy, the local constable issued the man a £80 fine for denting the police vehicle, claiming that the man ran into their vehicle, not the other way around.

An Albuquerque woman might want to think about taking the bus from now on. Over the past two-and-a-half years the woman has been issued 69 red-light camera tickets, and been pulled over 23 times for other reasons. It should be no surprise then that her driver’s license has been revoked and she has racked up more than $10,000 in traffic fines. While it is often possible to fight a red-light camera citation, it would be difficult to get out of 69 of them.

Despite receiving so many traffic citations in less than three years, the Albuquerque woman never ended up in jail. Unfortunately, that was not the case for a woman from Dallas who failed to pay a parking fine. Police stopped the 97-year-old woman while she was driving and found a warrant for her arrest for having out-of-date registration and failing to pay a previous parking ticket. The elderly woman spent two hours behind bars before her lawyer came to the rescue.

And, in our final tale, in a strange twist, it must have been a slow day at the office in London. So slow, in fact, that police issued themselves parking tickets. Of course, they refused to pay the fines, and the cases made it all the way to the Parking Appeals tribunal.

While these tales of traffic tickets are somewhat humorous, sometimes unfair and a bit unusual, it is important to remember that any time you are issued a traffic violation, you have the right to contest it. Doing so successfully can often result in decreased fines, fewer points on your New York driver’s license and could keep your insurance from increasing. So the next time you get a ticket, consider consulting an experienced traffic violation attorney to determine whether you should fight your New York traffic ticket.