Dave Naffziger’s Blog

I’m beginning to like Barack Obama more and more.

Reuters wrote that shortly before declaring his candidacy, Barack paid Cambridge $400 for 17 parking tickets that he received 17 years ago while at Harvard Law. That’s $23.50 a ticket - parking fines have clearly risen faster than inflation.

I’ve taken a few creative parking liberties around Boston, and have had to shell out large sums of money to pay down my tickets. Whether true or not, I’ve always reasoned that parking tickets were equivalent to garage fees - just a cost of street parking.

I had always thought (hoped) that parking tickets disappeared at some point. Amnesty, lost paperwork, digitization, systems upgrades, etc. 17 years is a long time - clearly they are more diligent than I thought.