Universities are about learning, and, if nothing else, UC Irvine has taught Janet Kinosian a lesson: When you're supposed to pay to park, you better pay to park.
Kinosian is a professional writer and a grown woman and would be the first to tell you she learned how to feed meters long ago. It's just that, well, sometimes a person doesn't have any quarters on them. And, as in Kinosian's case, sometimes you just feel lucky.
Kinosian had that feeling one night in February when she went to work out in the Anteater Recreation Center on campus. She could have planned ahead or scoured the environs for the 50 cents needed for a one-hour parking permit but instead decided, oh, what the heck.
I would chastise her on moral grounds, except she apparently is a woman after my own heart. I detest paying for parking, not on grounds of cheapness but on grounds that what else should that empty space be used for but to rest a person's car?
And why should there be a cost attached to it?
It's not like you're paying for a service. You're not buying anything. You're simply storing your transportation, like you would a horse to the hitching post in the Old West. If your car weren't taking the spot, it'd be someone else's.
Yes, the parking lot could be converted to something else that generated revenue. I understand that, but until it is, I don't see why the uninhabited land should gobble up money from people who, obviously, have to put their cars somewhere.
You'll notice that malls understand the concept that cars have to go somewhere. So do many hospitals. Even our newspaper gets it -- in Orange County, The Times sometimes turns over our parking lot to community groups. We don't charge people to leave their cars outside the meeting room.
Kinosian is unhappy because her misplaced sense of luck resulted in her getting a $52 ticket. To her, that was a pretty outrageous sum for a two-bit infraction (make that four bits).
I must agree. It smacks of penalizing a football team 30 yards for being offsides.
Call me a dangerous thinker, but my idea of parking infractions are when, for example, you park illicitly in a handicapped space or block a fire lane or some other situation when your deed threatens safety or violates common courtesy.
Kinosian isn't even protesting her ticket. She simply wants to know why a public university can hit a taxpayer for $52 over a 50-cent gambit. And where the money goes. She protested her ticket to a hearing officer this month, but to no avail. Her final option, which she doesn't plan to exercise, is to go to Municipal Court.
