New Law Requires Handicapped Tag/Placard for DVs to Park in HC Spaces

[Axxe55]

This here I will try to remember.

I can still respect their status as veteran, but dislike the person. I have seen plenty of assholes that manned-up and served our country.

And here is another perspective. Maybe something they went through while serving, made them an asshole?

 

[Axxe55]

Did they clear out all the .22 as well?

Their fingers looked too fat to load 22's!

And I doubt they got any further than the snack foods!

 

[rotor]

I see no problem with limiting handicap parking to people with physical disability, veterans or not. I know many disabled vets that work full time, can outrun me, and collect disability too (and yes I am a veteran). My wife was temporarily disabled 2 years ago, we got a placard, it was still hard to find a parking spot because they were all filled with people that could outwalk her.

 

[Hoji]

Their fingers looked too fat to load 22's!

And I doubt they got any further than the snack foods!

That is the demographic that is known for reselling ammo at retarded prices after putting down the plastic sheets, turning off the AC, and rolling on every round to give them that neckbeard essence.

 

[TreyG-20]

I know many disabled vets that work full time, can outrun me, and collect disability too (and yes I am a veteran).

That would be me. Wait, how far are we running?

 

[rotor]

That would be me. Wait, how far are we running?

Not very far.

 

[TreyG-20]

Not very far.

Then yes that is me.

 

[TreyG-20]

That is the demographic that is known for reselling ammo at retarded prices after putting down the plastic sheets, turning off the AC, and rolling on every round to give them that neckbeard essence.

Rolling like the rolls of fat? Greased up .22?

 

[Royalecheese]

Well, some DV's aren't actually disabled as to need a handicap spot. I have seen some that walk better than me. That and 20-30 yr olds, driving their parent/grandparent's car with a HC card, park in a HC spot, that just irritates the crap out me. Especially when they take up a spot and one that actually needs it, ends up parking way at the end of a row.

Not a slam, but a friendly reminder... I have probably seen what you are talking about as well. For me, I walk fine and will gladly park in left field to walk to a store. On the other hand, my wife is in her 40s, looks like she is in her 30s, but has undergone multiple fusions and back surgeries. While she walks fine for a certain amount of time, she can hit a wall making it difficult to very painful for her to walk, so we always park in a handicap slot if it is available. We have placards in both cars even though it may not look like we "really need them." So, while some may abuse it, there are others out there like my wife that do have a need for the hanger even when it may not look like they do.

I mention all this because we had someone come up to us one day and question why we parked in a slot when we looked fine. Apparently the guy thought only people in wheelchairs should be parking there. The wife went off like a bomb and the poor man barely left with his testicles intact.

 

[Vaquero]

If it's all that's available, I'm using the HC bathroom stall. Obviously, if a wheelchair or crutches are waiting. I'm waiting too.
If not, I won't be in there long.

 

[baboon]

I've never heard of a Garland rifle. Do you have any pictures of it?

Phucing auto correct!

 

[cycleguy2300]

You need to start wearing a non-working watch then! Who would know when that 15 minutes started!

I'm sorry, but I have a vindictive side for some things. One is when someone that is entirely capable using a handicapped parking spot just because they are too lazy to walk, or whatever.

Oh, I feel ya. It's just is the juice worth the squeeze since there is about a 5% chance of getting the car loaded before the owner came out and if its not road ready they are allowed to drive off

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[baboon]

I have a handicapped hanger. Not sure it was easy to get. I sent for the paperwork which required a doctor sign off on it. That meant calling the doctors office, making an appointment & paying for the appointment.

Then I had to drag my obese fat ass down to the tax office stand in line to get it. I’m sure there are obese people on disability just because they are obese.

I mainly walk with a cane. My standing, walking, sitting & laying can only be tolerated for so long before my back gets worse. Normally my back feels like dealing with kidney stones. Road trips to the grocery store phucs with my back! My back is so phuced that I can’t even bang the wife!

My back has bothered me my whole adult life, yet I put in 36 years on a full time job & 22 on the seasonal one. I didn’t choose being a gimp! My weight only went crazy as other injuries limited my mobility.

The only way I’ll loose weight is either surgery or the new wonder pill. I have had enough surgeries that I’m reluctant for another. Every surgery that I have had in the past added to my weight during the recovery from it.

I miss lots of activities from my old life. Lots of my plans for my retirement have changed. Ain’t nothing guaranteed in life, but death & taxes.

 

[Axxe55]

Oh, I feel ya. It's just is the juice worth the squeeze since there is about a 5% chance of getting the car loaded before the owner came out and if its not road ready they are allowed to drive off

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It was more sarcastic humor on my part and that I sympathize with you on this issue. You're a good guy, and a great cop.

 

[Sasquatch]

Oh, I feel ya. It's just is the juice worth the squeeze since there is about a 5% chance of getting the car loaded before the owner came out and if its not road ready they are allowed to drive off

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That's an interesting impound policy. Of course my towing experience was in another state, towing for other police agencies - but once a cop ordered an impound there, there was no "driving off" - that car was getting towed, period. Didn't matter if the owner came out and gave a sob story or wanted to leave, they got to pay their stupid tax (the citation + release fee to the PD that ordered the tow, for the release form they then took to the tow company + the cost of the tow, payable to the tow company + a minimum of one-day of storage) for their assholery.

When it came to private property impounds, for illegal parking once the vehicle was in the air or going up the flatbed - if they wanted the car back they paid a drop fee or the car went for the ride, and they got to pay for the tow + storage.

Does your agency use a rotation list for their tows, or do they put out the all-call and whatever wrecker service arrives first gets it? PD set the tow rates, or does the tow company get to charge WTF ever they want?

 

[Axxe55]

That's an interesting impound policy. Of course my towing experience was in another state, towing for other police agencies - but once a cop ordered an impound there, there was no "driving off" - that car was getting towed, period. Didn't matter if the owner came out and gave a sob story or wanted to leave, they got to pay their stupid tax (the citation + release fee to the PD that ordered the tow, for the release form they then took to the tow company + the cost of the tow, payable to the tow company + a minimum of one-day of storage) for their assholery.

When it came to private property impounds, for illegal parking once the vehicle was in the air or going up the flatbed - if they wanted the car back they paid a drop fee or the car went for the ride, and they got to pay for the tow + storage.

Does your agency use a rotation list for their tows, or do they put out the all-call and whatever wrecker service arrives first gets it? PD set the tow rates, or does the tow company get to charge WTF ever they want?

A lot of smaller cities and towns in Texas have wreckers on rotation for impounds and wrecks. Unless a specific wrecker is requested.

 

[Sasquatch]

A lot of smaller cities and towns in Texas have wreckers on rotation for impounds and wrecks. Unless a specific wrecker is requested.

Sounds like they're transitioning away from the old way of an all-call being put out. We used to read about Texas' police towing / impounds / wreck calls in the trade magazines, and the stupid, dangerous shit towers down here would do to be first on scene (running red lights, using blocker cars to plug up intersections so the competition - and other traffic - couldn't get through to name a couple) There were systems worked out too, so that if two or more drivers got to the scene at the same time, they'd carry challenge coins and either flip, or draw a coin from a hat (three or more showed up at once) to see who got it.

There were stories of tow operators getting into fist fights over who got to take the wrecked car. I've talked to a couple local towers since moving here and they liked the old system. Montgomery County, I guess passed an ordinance moving police tows to rotation vs all-call, some of the guys like it, others hate it because they said they saw a steep drop in revenue.

There were only a handful of places in Oregon that put out an all call when I started towing nearly 20 years ago, and they were rural counties / small towns, with few towing companies. Not quite like the stories we read about from Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio.

 

[cycleguy2300]

Sounds like they're transitioning away from the old way of an all-call being put out. We used to read about Texas' police towing / impounds / wreck calls in the trade magazines, and the stupid, dangerous shit towers down here would do to be first on scene (running red lights, using blocker cars to plug up intersections so the competition - and other traffic - couldn't get through to name a couple) There were systems worked out too, so that if two or more drivers got to the scene at the same time, they'd carry challenge coins and either flip, or draw a coin from a hat (three or more showed up at once) to see who got it.

There were stories of tow operators getting into fist fights over who got to take the wrecked car. I've talked to a couple local towers since moving here and they liked the old system. Montgomery County, I guess passed an ordinance moving police tows to rotation vs all-call, some of the guys like it, others hate it because they said they saw a steep drop in revenue.

There were only a handful of places in Oregon that put out an all call when I started towing nearly 20 years ago, and they were rural counties / small towns, with few towing companies. Not quite like the stories we read about from Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio.

We have a pretty regulated system of wreckers in Austin. They all have to pay for a city tow license which comes with inspections.
For service rotation tows (crashes and stalls) they are GPS dispatched based on proximity with a 300yd exclusion zone. Closest gets it.

For impounds (arrests, traffic hazards, parking vio) there is one company for south of the river and one for north, but they are quick.

All rotations are the same fee, no matter the company (185+25) so you don't get some of the shady $500 tows some Troopers were telling me about from the border when they came to help out with the bomber. Impounds are 215+25. Impounds if hooked up at all can charge a $50 drop fee, unless they are road ready and they can drive off. I am a pretty free market guy, but since folks don't have an option for getting a tow it's nice citizens don't get screwed.

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[Sasquatch]

We have a pretty regulated system of wreckers in Austin. They all have to pay for a city tow license which comes with inspections.
For service rotation tows (crashes and stalls) they are GPS dispatched based on proximity with a 300yd exclusion zone. Closest gets it.

For impounds (arrests, traffic hazards, parking vio) there is one company for south of the river and one for north, but they are quick.

All rotations are the same fee, no matter the company (185+25) so you don't get some of the shady $500 tows some Troopers were telling me about from the border when they came to help out with the bomber. Impounds are 215+25. Impounds if hooked up at all can charge a $50 drop fee, unless they are road ready and they can drive off. I am a pretty free market guy, but since folks don't have an option for getting a tow it's nice citizens don't get screwed.

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I'm going to assume insurance costs are similar here compared to PNW as far as the commercial costs go, so those are pretty good rates, comparable to what we'd get on the average impound (which was usually within 5 miles of our lot, as our county ran the tow rotation system and the county was divided into 6 areas, to tow in a given area your company had to have a lot in it, to keep response times and mileage fees reasonable)

I've also noticed a LOT of tow trucks down here are not purpose built trucks - that is these guys are running 1-ton pickups with underlifts installed into / under the pickup bed. Most don't have a cab protector / headache rack (which I was told by former employers was a USDOT requirement for a wrecker or flatbed) on those setups. Aside from rollbacks, full on tow-body units are a lot more rare around here. Maybe its cheaper (that's my guess, because reaching over a pickup bed to get your tools / dollies, etc sure isn't easier than snatching them off a dedicated tow body!) - pre-COVID hysteria, the average cost for a 4500 or 5500 size light duty wrecker was $75k new, and something like a Navistar or Freightliner medium duty wrecker or rollback was $105k before you started adding extra tool boxes, enhanced warning light / work light packages, remote operated winches.

The downside to the impound / wreck game for us was only 1/3 of the cars ever got picked up by insurance or their owner. We had to sit on 2/3 of them for the state mandated 30 or 45 days (depending on value) before we could auction them off. Non-drivers almost always went to a crusher or wrecking yard. The fellow I worked for for the bulk of my time driving wreckers got out of the non-consensual tow game and it made life over-all easier and less stressful, but I gotta say we missed out on the fun of working the crashes / winchouts as much as the rotation guys. We still did them via customer request, or when the PD didn't want to dick with the rotation and called the tow in to AAA instead.

I like the GPS dispatching system - AAA was going that way nation-wide in the last few years for all service calls & tows, closest appropriate vehicle is supposed to be the one getting dispatched. Once the system got ironed out, our average response times dropped by 1/3 - which I really appreciated when I moved from being a tow monkey into being an owner of a service company (we did everything but towing, I could not convince my partners to buy a tow truck because of the costs and extra paperwork / licensing) - the less time your guys are sitting in traffic, or picking their belly, the less money they are wasting and the more they are making. The public benefits too, because the faster a stalled or wrecked car is cleared the better traffic flows.

The $50 drop fee was what we'd charge as well for PPI drops. No drop fees on police impounds, as I mentioned earlier, once the po-po ordered an impound there was no going back, the car was going for a ride and you got to pay for the full meal deal.

PPI tows were regulating in the larger cities, but in the suburbs it was the wild-west as far as impound pricing. Some companies were fair, others would basically assess what they thought you could pay and try to stroke you. There were some shady-ass companies that would try to inflate the bills for nice vehicles on the hopes the owner couldn't/wouldn't pay, so they could try to flip the car for more or add it to the personal collection of the business owner. I hated those assholes.

 

[cycleguy2300]

I'm going to assume insurance costs are similar here compared to PNW as far as the commercial costs go, so those are pretty good rates, comparable to what we'd get on the average impound (which was usually within 5 miles of our lot, as our county ran the tow rotation system and the county was divided into 6 areas, to tow in a given area your company had to have a lot in it, to keep response times and mileage fees reasonable)

I've also noticed a LOT of tow trucks down here are not purpose built trucks - that is these guys are running 1-ton pickups with underlifts installed into / under the pickup bed. Most don't have a cab protector / headache rack (which I was told by former employers was a USDOT requirement for a wrecker or flatbed) on those setups. Aside from rollbacks, full on tow-body units are a lot more rare around here. Maybe its cheaper (that's my guess, because reaching over a pickup bed to get your tools / dollies, etc sure isn't easier than snatching them off a dedicated tow body!) - pre-COVID hysteria, the average cost for a 4500 or 5500 size light duty wrecker was $75k new, and something like a Navistar or Freightliner medium duty wrecker or rollback was $105k before you started adding extra tool boxes, enhanced warning light / work light packages, remote operated winches.

The downside to the impound / wreck game for us was only 1/3 of the cars ever got picked up by insurance or their owner. We had to sit on 2/3 of them for the state mandated 30 or 45 days (depending on value) before we could auction them off. Non-drivers almost always went to a crusher or wrecking yard. The fellow I worked for for the bulk of my time driving wreckers got out of the non-consensual tow game and it made life over-all easier and less stressful, but I gotta say we missed out on the fun of working the crashes / winchouts as much as the rotation guys. We still did them via customer request, or when the PD didn't want to dick with the rotation and called the tow in to AAA instead.

I like the GPS dispatching system - AAA was going that way nation-wide in the last few years for all service calls & tows, closest appropriate vehicle is supposed to be the one getting dispatched. Once the system got ironed out, our average response times dropped by 1/3 - which I really appreciated when I moved from being a tow monkey into being an owner of a service company (we did everything but towing, I could not convince my partners to buy a tow truck because of the costs and extra paperwork / licensing) - the less time your guys are sitting in traffic, or picking their belly, the less money they are wasting and the more they are making. The public benefits too, because the faster a stalled or wrecked car is cleared the better traffic flows.

The $50 drop fee was what we'd charge as well for PPI drops. No drop fees on police impounds, as I mentioned earlier, once the po-po ordered an impound there was no going back, the car was going for a ride and you got to pay for the full meal deal.

PPI tows were regulating in the larger cities, but in the suburbs it was the wild-west as far as impound pricing. Some companies were fair, others would basically assess what they thought you could pay and try to stroke you. There were some shady-ass companies that would try to inflate the bills for nice vehicles on the hopes the owner couldn't/wouldn't pay, so they could try to flip the car for more or add it to the personal collection of the business owner. I hated those assholes.

99% use rollbacks here, the trucks and the company have city inspectioms and the wrecker enforcement will yank their license for a few days or a week if they start getting shady, leaving car parts at crashes, unlicensed drivers or trucks...

I was talking to a driver for probably the largest wrecker company and he said he gets 1/3 of the wrecker fee and pulls $90k/year just driving. The company gets the other 2/3 and any daily yard fees or the money for the car if it gets left. Not a bad job really...

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