{"id":431739,"date":"2025-12-07T20:40:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T20:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/431739\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T20:40:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T20:40:16","slug":"to-snitch-or-not-to-snitch-is-proposed-parking-scofflaw-law-a-good-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/431739\/","title":{"rendered":"To snitch or not to snitch? Is proposed parking scofflaw law a good idea?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a tough one.<\/p>\n

As a rule, I\u2019m not a on-this-hand, on-the-other kind of columnist. That\u2019s chicken … umm … bleep. My job is to not equivocate but make a stand. If you\u2019re going to take Vienna, as Napoleon said, take Vienna. No half measures.<\/p>\n

But regarding the ordinance Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) outlined in Fran Spielman\u2019s article Thursday,<\/a> allowing Chicagoans to take photos and turn in commercial vehicles violating parking ordinances, leaving their big blue electric Prime vans in bike lanes and crosswalks, well, I\u2019m torn here.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s good that it\u2019s being delayed, so the issues can be weighed.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, as a former avid city cyclist, in my younger days \u2014 for years after the Divvy system rolled out, I wrote a periodic \u201cDivvy Diary\u201d<\/a> recounting the joys of blasting those big blue bombers down Chicago streets \u2014I know you take your life in your hands every time you have to veer around some double-parked doofus.<\/p>\n

Why should innocent cyclists energetically going about their business be forced to risk getting themselves creamed by a bus so that housebound shopping addicts sprawled on their sofas can receive their daily, if not hourly, infusion of superfluous junk?<\/p>\n

On the other: I too order from Amazon. I too marvel when something bought a few hours ago shows up, Johnny-on-the-spot. I don\u2019t have a dog in this race, living as I do in the sprawling, low-density leafy suburban paradise that is Northbrook. A half dozen Prime vans could simultaneously pull up in front of our house, day or night, and easily find a place to park. Some days, it seems they do.<\/p>\n

In the city, most blocks are wall-to-wall parked cars. So where else are delivery trucks supposed to stop, if not in bike lanes and crosswalks? They only stop briefly, and if you happen to come hammering along and, checking your heart rate on your Apple watch, rear end one, well, tough luck. Maybe you should concentrate on where you\u2019re going, and you won\u2019t get doored while fiddling with your bike computer.<\/p>\n

Then there is the risk of dragooning the population into traffic enforcement. Is that respect for law? Or trying create a population of snitches?<\/p>\n

La Spata isn\u2019t only doing this out of concern for law, generally, but to scratch his own private itch. He\u2019s a cyclist, posting Instagram videos of himself<\/a> leading critical mass bike rides to meetings of the City Council Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which he chairs.<\/p>\n

All good, right? Onward toward a Scandinavian-style cyclist\u2019s paradise? Or another example of leaders putting their own priorities first? Maybe La Spata should sponsor an ordinance encouraging police officers to snitch on each other. Because right now the code of silence requires them to cough into into their fists twice upon detecting thin blue line crime, provided no one is around to hear the coughs.<\/p>\n

There is risk involved. As someone who walks around a lot, and often takes photos of what I see, I\u2019d hate to be minding my own business, trying to capture an evocative arrangement of snow on a bare tree branch, only to have some burly delivery guy run over, knock my phone out of my hands and jump on it because he thinks I\u2019m taking a photo of his license plate.<\/p>\n

OK, Steinberg, choose. Ordinance = bad. Is not a culture of snitching another milestone in the road to totalitarianism? Stukach they called it in Soviet Union. Squealing. We start by encouraging people to report someone parking in a crosswalk, then before we know it, schoolchildren are turning in their parents for working on Trump\u2019s birthday.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re closer than you think. In case you missed it, the National Park Service just scratched Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth from its free entry holiday list, replacing it with the 47th president\u2019s birthday. Thank God we\u2019re all so numb, or we\u2019d have to scan the headlines with our phones in one hand and air sickness bags in the other.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: The whole issue is soon going to be moot anyway. Those automatic camera speeding fines already show us the actual future \u2014 traffic tickets being levied without intercession of a person. Encouraging Chicagoans to snap photos of parking scofflaws will just create more evidence of low-level crime for police to ignore.<\/p>\n

If you tally up the number of people who order delivery \u2014 not just Amazon, but pizzas, Door Dash and prescriptions \u2014 and compare them to the number of bicyclists, the delivery recipient cohort wins, hands down. Don\u2019t hate me for telling you.<\/p>\n

Maybe Ald. La Spata should pass an ordinance allowing Amazon vans to drive on the sidewalk. Because that\u2019s the direction society is going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a tough one. As a rule, I\u2019m not a on-this-hand, on-the-other kind of columnist. That\u2019s chicken…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":431740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-431739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115680223560452584","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}