Government theft gone awry

Parking meters are a horrendous scam. We pay taxes already to establish and maintain roads. Where, then, is the justification to further charge people to park their vehicle on publicly built and maintained roads? Ridiculous. Furthermore, they often make decisions of questionable integrity and legitimacy even beyond the initial parking charges. For example, a couple years ago they extended the time needed to pay from 6 until 7 p.m. and upped the charge from a buck an hour to a buck and a quarter. I was still at PSU at the time and found my parking fees more than doubled overnight from 4 bucks a week to 9 bucks. Thanks, City of Portland, for your greed. Except it did not work out for them. I just changed my habits and instead parked much, much later and thus they cost themselves money because they ended up getting less than 4 bucks a week. Whatever. It was still a stupid move by stupid people.

But not as stupid as the Huntington, West Virginia parking meter runners. In their thirst for vengeance on the meter overrunners, they purchased a couple new little carts for the meter people to monitor meters in...the only problem is, the carts they purchased are illegal to run on the streets. So to write the tickets to the malicious parking offenders...they have to risk receiving a ticket for illegal use of the very streets they are protecting.

Let me be the first to say "Ha!" It couldn't happen to a nicer group. Well, maybe legislators...