
It's time for legislators and the DMV to crack down on disabled parking cheats - JumpCrisscross
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-disabled-parking-placards-20170501-story.html
======
x1798DE
Why is it "time"? Is there some critical shortage of handicapped parking?
Every time I go anywhere with a parking lot, there seems to be _lots_ of
available handicapped parking. Obviously it's great fun to feel indignant when
you have to park in a less-good spot while someone with a placard pulls in and
walks in - clearly a cheat - but if it's not _actually_ significantly
affecting people on average, just write it off as cost of doing business.

That said, I even caution against judging other people for their use of a
disabled placard without an apparent motion disability. I had a friend who had
nothing obviously wrong with him (I was friends with him for about a year
before I even knew he had a disabled placard), but one day he gave me a ride
and apparently felt the need to explain to me that he has MS, and that walking
was quite painful for him even though he moved with an apparently normal pace
and gait. Presumably there are many other reasons why an otherwise normal-
looking person would have and/or use one of these placards, so I really think
you need to come in with more than anecdotes about people who don't _seem_
disabled.

~~~
vkou
> while someone with a placard pulls in and walks in - clearly a cheat

As you've also mentioned, I can't stress this enough - you don't have to look
handicapped to have a disability.

Some people with disabilities can walk - but with difficulty. Some people with
disabilities can't walk very far. Some people with disabilities can walk most
of the time - but sometimes, their legs go out from under them, and why-the-
hell-should-we-not-just-give-them-the-handicapped spot?

Both my mother, and my mother-in-law have disabilities. They suffer through
them - and if it weren't for my mother-in-law's cane, at first glance, you
wouldn't know.

~~~
LorenPechtel
And some can even walk normally. I used to know someone like that--serious
heart defect but her body was otherwise normal. She wasn't supposed to walk
any farther than she had to.

And it's also possible to legitimately park in a handicapped space with no
handicapped person in the car. I've done it before--I was picking up the
person to whom the placard belonged.

------
lizzard
I'm a placard holder and I think this article is full of horrible ideas. The
fee, the weird limitations on metered parking use for people with particular
disabilities or impairments, but most of all the way the article uncritically
invites people to scrutinize placard holders and try to tell by looking at
them if they are "really disabled" or not. With the existing laws, placards
must be renewed every 2 years. If the DMV is issuing renewals to dead people
as the article claims, that seems fixable without screwing the rest of us
over.

~~~
turc1656
Most of the suggestions I found to make sense and be very reasonable.

The issue raised is reminiscent of how the number of people on disability
dramatically rose during the financial crisis. And that's the sort of thing
that's actually much worse because it's incredibly costly to society. But it's
not just that one time period. As this link shows ([http://apps.npr.org/unfit-
for-work/](http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/)) that correlation of
disability with the employment rate is nothing new.

But back to the main point here - for purposes of disability parking, in
nearly every case someone should be able to look to see if someone is actually
disabled. Again, this is for the purposes of having that placard, nothing
else. That's because the reason for having that placard is to make the
distance walked shorter for those who really need it. It should be obvious to
anyone looking if someone may be having a much tougher time walking than the
average person. For those on disability for legitimate reasons but may not
have trouble walking - guess what, they don't need the placard and can walk
the extra 100 or 200 feet. What we're talking about here is something that
should be visibly verifiable in the overwhelming majority of cases.

~~~
scblock
If you look at some of the other comments on this thread you'll see people
with direct experience showing that you're wrong about it being "visibly
verifiable". I hope you rethink your assumptions about others.

~~~
turc1656
The language I used clearly is not all-or-nothing. I said the overwhelming
majority of cases. What you are referring to is an edge case - a situation
that is more rare than the far more common situations. It should be clear that
I acknowledge that not every situation is visibly verifiable from what I
wrote.

------
sp332
Charging handicapped people fees doesn't make sense. I mean it's literally
charging someone for being injured. (On top of that, many of them are on some
kind of welfare which means the state would be taking back money they just
gave the person.)

Just because someone can walk from the closest parking space into a store
doesn't mean they aren't injured and don't need a placard. So opening the
article that way really demonstrates a lack of understanding.

~~~
turc1656
It's not charging someone for being injured. It's the equivalent of getting a
licence renewal. It's not free. Do you still consider that same driver to be
getting charged for being disabled when they are renewing their license? Or
for that matter, any (voluntary) fee that the government charges when a
citizen chooses to do something?

The process to review an application for a disability placard I'm quite sure
takes longer to complete than that of a simple license renewal. If there's a
fee for one, why would there not be a fee for the other? Also, there is no
requirement that they apply for the placard and could always not apply for it
if the $25 really made that much of a difference to them - a cost, I remind
you, which would cover 2-4 years so we're talking about 50 cents to a dollar a
month. And which would also help to make spots more available to them by
stopping the scumbags who are using their dead grandmother's tag to park in
the best spots every time they go out.

~~~
sp332
I guess I would be in favor of some fraud checking, but I'm afraid that it
will quickly degenerate into harassment of people who don't look "handicapped
enough". As for why it makes no sense to charge for license renewal - the
person already has to get a note from a doctor saying they're eligible, and
going to that doctor costs money. After that the state only has to
authenticate the doctor's note and issue the placard. Remember, there's no
inherent right to a handicapped parking space. The whole system was just made
up to help disabled people. It would be completely inconsistent to add hassle
and fees to the system. Anyway flat fees hurt poorer people harder, so it's
aggravating inequality to begin with. And disabled people probably make less
money than average, so that's even worse.

~~~
turc1656
Fraud checking could be really quick and easy. A tag/placard is registered to
an individual. If that information were easily available to whoever was going
to enforce this (and maybe it already is quickly accessible, I don't know),
they would merely need to type in the tag number and see who it is registered
to. That person's state ID or driver's license has a photo attached to it and
they could easily see if that person is either the driver or a passenger. If
the car is parked in a handicap spot and that person isn't present, they can
cite for a violation.

So there would not need to be any harassment of people who don't seem
disabled. We would continue to assume, as we do today, that the issuance of
the tag is valid. We would just be checking that when it is utilized, the
person associated with it is actually present.

"After that the state only has to authenticate the doctor's note and issue the
placard." \- maybe it is that simple. Let's assume it is. But when I renew my
driver's via postal mail there is literally nothing that needs to be checked
or verified. It's one piece of paper that requires no verifying documents and
just gets processed. And it still costs something like $24 in my state. And
for vehicle registration the process is nearly identical and yet it costs $56
where I live. You're argument in this regard doesn't hold merit because it is
entirely inconsistent, unless you also believe the fees for those should be
waived because they are disabled. And please spare me the "aggravating
inequality" nonsense. All of that is a product of the entitlement mentality
that has become far too common. Most people who are disabled receive a
government benefit in some form or another. So the idea that a very, very
small portion of the money that is already taken from others and given to the
disabled be used to give them another benefit is not insane, especially when
it's a voluntary application. Guess what, things and services cost money.
Asking someone to shell out a pro-rated amount of 50 cents to a dollar a month
to have that placard benefit from funds the taxpayers give them is entirely
reasonable.

Yeah, flat fees do mean more to poorer people. But basic consumer protection
laws dictate that you are supposed to charge like buyers the same rate. And if
the cost of doing whatever costs X, it doesn't magically cost less than X
because someone is poor. It still costs X and that money is coming from
somewhere. In the end, all you're really arguing for is an additional flat
benefit of $25 to be given to anyone who is deemed legally disabled. Whether
it gets paid to them first or is absorbed on the back end doesn't mean much,
except for perhaps income tax purposes if they received it first so they would
have to pay with after tax money (like the rest of us).

------
VLM
Its fascinating to see problems in other states. Locally (thousands of miles
from CA) the "new urbanists" have a stealth strategy for discouraging car use
which is to write ridiculous handicapped requirements into zoning laws. So new
stores have to have 20 to 30 handicapped spots to discourage car use by the
99% unhandicapped customers. So no matter how big your parking lot is, and how
packed it is with customers, roughly 20% of spots will always be empty. Its an
interesting strategy for banning cars, they're not technically banning cars
from parking, its just parking now requires a handicap tag. It has the
pleasant side effect that even at major sporting events I've never actually
seen a parking lot with all handicapped spots filled, which must be very
convenient for handicapped people.

There are other problems. I used to work with a guy in a wheelchair and life
for those people is hell, at least once a week when his non-handicapped
brother picked him up in the lift van after work, some do-gooder would scream
at his brother for being evil enough to park in a handicapped spot, he would
even get blocked in until the cops arrive, do-gooders just make life for
everyone awful.

~~~
brohee
1 in 5 people has a disability
([https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/miscellane...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/miscellaneous/cb12-134.html)).

Not all of those justify an handicapped parking spot, but way more than 1% of
the population deserves one.

If a store has 99% handicapped customers, it's only because it's actually
hostile to people with an handicap.

~~~
joshuaheard
If 5% of the population is "disabled" for the purposes of a handicapped
parking sticker, do we need 5% of the parking spaces reserved for them? No.
All the disabled people can't be in all the disabled spots at the same time.
You must consider usage rates. If all 5% of the handicapped population is
using only 10% of the handicapped spots at any one time, we would only need
.5% of a parking lot to be handicapped spots.

This program has good intentions, but it needs to be more precise about how
many parking spots are actually needed, and who actually needs them.

~~~
aaron-santos
I'm not convinced that's how the math works. I can just as easily conclude
that if all 95% of the non-handicapped population is using only 10% of the
non-handicapped spots at any one time, we would only need 9.5% of a parking
lot to be non-handicapped spots.

------
mod
Well, if this isn't a slippery slope...

I can just imagine the process when someone starts having the power to tell
people they aren't disabled enough to get a placard.

We like to think these things will follow some common-sense logic, but in
reality that's rarely the case.

There's some low-hanging fruit like revoking old placards, but I don't think
this should get a whole lot of attention. Perhaps I'm just not part of the
club that says we need police to make sure people aren't being assholes.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
The article says:

> [The auditor recommends to...] Allow parking meter enforcers to access state
> placard data so they can nab cheaters on the spot. Now they must go through
> sworn law enforcement who are often too busy handling serious crime.

I understand that you feel these efforts should be ignored because there is
real "serious crime" to address.

But I disagree: a society with few felonies but a rampaging problem with
unenforced misdemeanors is not a nice place. It's reasonable to devote a large
effort towards preventing serious crime, but an appropriate effort towards
less serious crime is not zero.

Alternatively, you're correct that we don't need police to make sure people
aren't being assholes. They have more important things to do. But we do need
parking meter enforcement officers, and they should be empowered to make sure
that people aren't being assholes.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This isn't a misdemeanor nor should it be. It's a civil parking infraction.

------
pc86
> _A doctor’s certification is required to obtain a placard or plate, but 73%
> of the applications that were reviewed "did not fully describe the
> disability."_

Is it the DMV's responsibility to review medical claims and determine
eligibility, or does the doctor determine eligibility and the DMV simply fills
the request? If it's the latter I don't see any reason fro DMV paperwork to
describe the disability at all.

> _Also, 18% of the doctors’ signatures did not match those on file with state
> health boards. The auditor questioned whether 260,000 placards issued over a
> three-year period were valid._

What's the point of requiring a signature if it's not going to be verified?
These should be investigated and if the doctor didn't sign them, that's fraud.

> _A lot of placards that exist were issued to people now dead. They haven’t
> been canceled. The DMV catches many by checking state death records, but
> could identify thousands more by also examining federal data. The auditor
> figures at least 35,000._

I can't imagine this is costing the taxpayers any money or that people are
using their dead grandmother's handicapped placard.

> _As of June, there were 26,000 people age 100 or older holding placards,
> based on DMV data. But there are only an estimated 8,000 centenarians living
> in California._

This seems like it overlaps most of the prior point.

> _There is no limit on the number of replacement placards a holder can
> receive if one is "lost" or "stolen." Auditors found several people who had
> received 16 or more placards over a three-year period._

Imagine that, someone who is elderly and/or disabled misplaced a placard they
may only used once a month when they go grocery shopping.

------
nommm-nommm
Is the author of this piece the disabled police? People's disabilities don't
have to be apparent by looking at them to be real. My dad probably doesn't
look disabled but he has the lingering effects of the damage caused by a
childhood ankle injury which became chronic and the surgery to make it better
had the side effect of further limiting his ankle movement making walking much
more difficult. He's ok if he walks a little bit but too much and he's out of
commission and further aggravates the damage.

Someone with MS probably has limited mobility that isn't apparent as well.

~~~
pc86
The purpose of handicapped spaces is to make it easier to physically disabled
persons to get to where they're going. If you can hop out and sprint to the
door, that space isn't for you (whether you have a legitimate placard or not),
unless you're picking the person who owns the placard.

~~~
nommm-nommm
> If you can hop out and sprint to the door, that space isn't for you

1) They author didn't say sprint, they said walk "briskly" or whatever.

2) How do you know? My dad's injury severely limits the distance he can travel
on foot. He can move ok at the start of the day but he's only got a limited
amount of steps in one day. If he has to walk across the parking lot then
that's further limiting his day. He doctor says he's supposed to use it every
day but not overuse it. His limitations don't seem to be very apparent (at
least to me) because he's good about keeping within his limits.

------
Spooky23
Sounds like an incredible waste of time. Actually enforcing this stuff is
difficult because it's a personal issue. People have different pain thresholds
and challenges.

I'm always puzzled by how they allocate these resources anyway. They took away
about 80 spots at the mall where our local Apple store is to make rows of
handicapped spots. They are generally empty to begin with, and then you have
the issue of context. If you can't walk 300 yards from the parking lot, what
do you do when you need to walk a quarter mile in the mall? That probably has
a lot to do with the empty spots.

~~~
nkrisc
>what do you do when you need to walk a quarter mile in the mall?

Frequent breaks at benches or use of an assistive device. Before she stopped
driving at all my grandmother could walk on her own, though very slowly. She
probably could have walked from the far end of the parking lot but it was
simply dangerous for her to do so. If she went to the mall she'd walk as much
as she could and sit and rest, then continue on. Eventually she started using
a walking before she lost most of her mobility.

~~~
Spooky23
Good point.

One thing that I've noticed in some places around me is a reduction in those
types of conveniences. I used to work in the mall that I mentioned in high
school 25 years ago, and then there were benches (and garbage cans) all over
the place. IIRC, older KMarts and Wal-Marts used to have at least something in
the front of the store, which are missing now unless there is a food place in
the store.

Now, they seem to be building these weird little "living room" spaces with
couches, but there are fewer benches, indoor foliage plots, old-school water
features and similar 80's stuff with boundary walls to sit on.

------
dsfyu404ed
Well, on the brighter side this issue at least keeps the author and his zeal
for poorly thought out solutions to small societal problems from terrorizing
some HOA or zoning board.

I had a cousin who had a temporary placard because he had knee surgery and was
supposed to walk a very limited amount throughout the recovery. He wasn't
"disabled" per say but he wouldn't have recovered properly if he had been
walking everywhere during his recovery. I wonder what the author would think
of him.

------
valuearb
I think one reason you see "think pieces" like this is that handicapped
parking spaces are a massively under-utilized resource. I have never seen them
all used, not even close, but often I've seen a full or nearly full lot with
the best possible spots free and unusable because they are marked handicapped.
Able bodied people tend to get selfishly frustrated when they are forced to
walk all the way from the back of the lot in these circumstances.

One solution to this would be to allow pregnant woman and parents with young
children (under the age of 5) to park in handicapped spots. This would lead to
a higher utilization, and greater safety. Little kids can be hard to control,
and dart everywhere, saving just a few young lives would make it worthwhile.
And pregnant women shouldn't be forced to park in the back of the lot, esp.
when they'll need to carry groceries or other purchases.

Accommodations like this I would hope would also cool the jets of people like
the author. They'd see the handicapped spaces being used more, and hopefully
realize there is a wide range of people in our society who need this
assistance.

~~~
ChuckMcM
To your 'massively underutilized' comment:

I think it was Las Vegas where I saw people orbiting the 30 or so Handicap
marked spots Walmart looking for one to open up. The casino spot were also
nearly always full. Of course Las Vegas has a large number of retirees and a
fairly generous handicap placard handout policy. So between the two, the spots
are well utilized.

There was a similar Oakland story about abuse :
[http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/DMV-and-Oakland-
Pol...](http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/DMV-and-Oakland-Police-
Crackdown-on-Disabled-Placard-Abuse-205444701.html) which is the kind of thing
that gets people angry.

------
faux_intellect
For a laugh, I'd sure love to see the half-baked list of disabilities the
author thinks solely merit a handicapped placard, which he has doubtless
already compiled.

What sucks is that there tends to be a stigma that goes along with having a
placard, because, among other reasons, it's sometimes the case that onlookers
judge someone who puts up a placard on their mirror as if they are lying about
their disability just to park closer. It's one of the reasons why people with
legitimate disabilities tend not to use them when they have them, even at
meters.

Author contributes to this by seemingly lumping people who have real, non-
apparent disabilities with those who pretend to have a disability.

------
bdcravens
Remember not every who is disabled looks it. For instance: Cystic Fibrosis.
Many with CF just look thin, but may have less than 30% of expected lung
capacity.

That said, I have a family member who is a 16 year old soccer star who has a
handicap tag. Her grandfather, who is a disabled vet, bought her car, and
apparently due to how the registration works she also got the same tag. (I
have no idea if she abuses this however; she seems pretty honest)

~~~
nommm-nommm
She may have the tag but she isn't allowed to actually use it unless she's
driving grandpa.

------
dec0dedab0de
Maybe if they just get rid of the free meter parking people would stop wanting
to cheat.

------
5555624
Locally (Arlington, VA), the handicapped cannot park at meters for free. Back
in the late 1990s, they started their "All may park. All must pay." campaign
-- the point being to "remove the value of the handicapped placard." If you
still have to pay to park, it does not help when you park at meters. There are
some handicapped spots on the street with meters.

~~~
turc1656
This makes total sense to me. As I read the original link I was wondering why
CA has that rule in place. There's really no reason I can see that having a
disability placard should yield free parking. Glad to see at least one state
has some common sense.

------
turc1656
According to this guy:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDn6jiq_FjM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDn6jiq_FjM)

All we have to use is use that sign and 100% of this will cease to exist. I
highly doubt his 100% number will hold in the aggregate, but even if it's 80%
that's impressive for just changing the signage.

------
logfromblammo
This reminds me of a recent problem at work.

Basically, it was a problem caused by a fix to a problem caused by a fix to a
problem caused by a bad design decision. The obvious fix would have altered
the behavior of the first fix, which we weren't sure we could do, because
someone may have come to rely on the behavior of the first fix.

But overall, we were just very frustrated that we couldn't just address the
initial bad design decision, and make the whole mess evaporate into the
aether, because none of those problems exist with the standard (and good
enough) design.

The disability parking placard is a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to
a problem caused by a bad design decision. We can't exactly go all the way
back to the root problem without a time machine, but we don't have to be stuck
messing around at the leaf-level of the problem tree.

The best solution to the blue parking spaces problem is probably not to mess
around with plates and placards. It may actually be to reduce the need for
_anyone_ \--and the people with mobility impairments in particular--to
continually walk across parking lots in order to live their lives.

There shouldn't really be that much of a distinction between medically unable
to walk, too lazy to walk, and too busy/important to walk. If _everyone_ only
had to walk as much as they wanted to, no one would have to pretend they
couldn't. The real problem is that everything in the US is already so far
apart you can't economically walk any of it, and therefore you have to drive.
So you have to make everything even further apart, to accommodate cars. But
now you have to walk and drive and park and walk. Then you have to regulate
parking for people who can't walk as much. And then people cheat, because they
already have to park so far away from the place they actually want to be.
You're just piling patches on top of fixes.

So you design to eliminate the walking in the first place, and have your parks
and rec departments install unnecessary superfluous walking trails for the
people who still want to walk without a treadmill.

(This is essentially the same problem in Dwarf Fortress for how to get and
maintain a large population without killing your framerate. You essentially
have to eliminate pathfinding from your fortress, so that your dwarves never
have to walk more than a few steps to do anything. It is tremendously
difficult to do that without some very detailed planning.)

------
s73ver
1.) Just because someone doesn't "look disabled" doesn't mean they aren't
actually disabled.

2.) Just like the voter ID thing, show that it's actually a problem before
devoting a bunch of resources on a witch hunt.

------
douche
The less that the DMV is responsible for, the better. When they can get the
wait time for renewing a driver's license down under multiple hours, maybe
I'll consider them competent for additional duties.

