Adams Morgan Parking Problem An Uphill Battle

I had an old tennis ball in the back of the car, so I took it over to Calvert Street NW in Adams Morgan and placed it on the pavement. It didn't roll.

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Didn't roll around the corner on Cliffbourne Place, either. Or on Biltmore Street.

Which seemed a little strange, since a whole bunch of folks who live on those streets got an unusual kind of parking ticket last week. "Failure to Turn Wheels to Curb," the tickets read. The D.C. code says it's illegal to leave your car unattended without turning the front wheels toward the curb -- if you're parked on a hill.

No hills here.

Susan Hekhuis got one of the tickets and, well, "I lost my temper," she says. She complained to police and her council member. She sent photos showing how flat her street is. And she put up a notice in her apartment building, whereupon she learned that a few dozen other people had received tickets for the same violation.

"It's blatantly ridiculous," Hekhuis says. "Like we don't have enough to put up with in Adams Morgan, like the crazy parking situation and having my car broken into four times. The ticket was only $20, but the point is not the money. It's just morally wrong."

Scott Thompson said he saw the police in action, "ticketing every parked car in sight," more than 20 vehicles on two blocks, all for the same failure to turn wheels.

Thompson sent his account to D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier and a good chunk of her chain of command -- and soon, the city's bureaucracy creaked into action.

Council member Jim Graham, as is his wont, jumped into the fray on the Adams Morgan neighborhood e-mail discussion group, wondering whether the flurry of tickets might be a form of protest by police, a reaction to increased pressure for officers to do foot patrols. "The sudden occurrence of a lot of ticketing can signal officer discontent," Graham wrote.

I don't want to know how many hours of police investigation went into figuring out what happened, but judging from the e-mail traffic over the past week, there must be a whole lot of police brass wondering how their decades of work led them to devote so much time to the direction a parked car's wheels are facing.

It turns out that at a meeting of the Kalorama Citizens Association last month, residents vented to police about the nightmare of parking in Adams Morgan, especially late on weekend nights, when the partying masses descend on the nation's leading parking-free bar scene. (The one decent-size lot fills up when the night is a mere pup.)

"Someone suggested that the police come out on weekend nights and do some ticketing to discourage the partying crowd from parking illegally -- in front of hydrants, blocking alleys, taking people's private spots behind their houses in the alley," says Matt Forman, executive vice president of the citizens association.