The cabdriver raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth and then faced the charge: parking illegally in a no standing zone.
Not guilty, Mefin Assefa told the hearing examiner, who sat behind a desk on a raised platform, flanked by an American flag and a District flag, across from a wall clock, its hands stuck at 1 p.m.
At the Department of Motor Vehicle's 65 K Street NE headquarters, examiner Mark Harris questions a person challenging a ticket. The department has a staff of 18 examiners, each with a law degree.
(Photos Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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The Figures
70: The number of parking enforcement agents in the District in 1999.
Over 200: The number in 2004.
$45 million: The amount of fines assessed in 1999.
$99 million: The amount assessed in 2004.
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Yes, Assefa said, he had left his cab on O Street, but it was not exactly parked, more like pulled over, and only for a couple of minutes so he could escort a passenger -- an elderly, handicapped passenger, he stressed -- into her building.
A $50 ticket was slapped on his windshield.
Jonathan Owens, the hearing examiner, was unimpressed. "Being a cabdriver does not authorize you to park illegally," he pronounced, upholding the ticket. The cabby stormed off, complaining that his act of chivalry had cost him nearly a day's wages.
Of all the rituals of urban life, none may be so routine as parking or may possess the power to inspire such teeth-gnashing frustration, particularly for those who believe they do not deserve their tickets.
In the District, which handed out nearly $100 million in parking tickets last year, an amount that doubled over the previous five years, the disgruntled flock for relief to a floor of cramped, pale yellow hearing rooms, where examiners wade through a mind-numbing thicket of citations.
In most cases, examiners uphold the tickets, brushing aside dog-ate-my-homework-style excuses that range from unseen parking signs to never-opened letters cataloguing transgressions. Yet there's a chance that the motorist might prevail. In 2004, more than a third of those who contested tickets in the District won their cases, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles, a percentage that has inched upward in recent years.
Parking tickets are viewed as sufficiently vulnerable to technical challenge -- a missing date or an incorrectly noted car make can be enough to do the trick -- that one entrepreneur makes his living getting tickets dismissed in New York, Boston, San Francisco and the District. "Parking tickets have become an intrusion in people's daily lives," said Glen Bolofsky, founder of ParkingTicket.com, a New Jersey-based Internet service that contests citations for a fee. "Most people don't fight. Most people can't take the time."
In the District, contesting tickets in person can require a morning or afternoon for the trip to the DMV's 65 K Street NE headquarters, where motorists slump in bucket seats in a windowless waiting room while a television intermittently repeats a public service announcement promoting photo-enforcement cameras.
It's a place where people fight off drowsiness, roll their eyes and occasionally lash out in ways that leave the examiners wishing they had alarms to alert security, instead of switches behind their desks that turn on a light outside the door.
"You flip the switch, and they think someone scored a goal in hearing room 8," joked Stephen Reichert, 30, an examiner who edits an online poetry magazine in his off hours. A calendar featuring a drawing of Gertrude Stein is the only personal effect in the otherwise sterile room.
"No one has ever grabbed me," Reichert explained, although he recalled that one unsatisfied woman once intoned, "May God have mercy on you; I hope nothing happens to you."
Mostly, the disgust burbles up as a smirk, a sneer or a mutter.
