….For some, parking illegally has become routine, despite the risk of a $20 citation for a first offense. MATCâ??s own traffic cops wrote 2,927 parking tickets and another 1,500 warnings last year.
Still, that level of enforcement has done little to stop drivers from blocking driveways, pulling up onto snowbanks or just leaving their vehicles parked illegally and taking a chance.
“We could sit out there all day long but we canâ??t spend all our resources just writing parking tickets,” says Jim Bottoni, chief of public safety, whose staff of four must handle calls for 13 MATC facilities across a 12-county region.
To ease the parking crunch, MATC is proposing to build a new 360-space surface parking lot on vacant land next to the schoolâ??s softball stadium.