By Ben Joravsky
Her lament’s another chapter in the age-old saga of car wars, in which the city tries to wring every dime it can out of motorists whose hopeless dependency on their cars exposes them to all sorts of arcane laws and exorbitant fines. The simple fact is that there are too many cars in the city and most people would be far better off taking public transportation.
On Wednesday, January 27, she parked her car in the 700 block of North Hudson, and soon discovered the ultimate irony: her effort to stop getting tickets had resulted in yet another. “I came out and saw the ticket and I said, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ I figured this has to be a joke. I had paid the meter. I was parked within the lines. Then I looked on the ticket and it said, ‘Vehicle posted for sale.’ That’s a $25 ticket. I thought, ‘No, this can’t be true.’ I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding. It’s against the law to post a For Sale sign?’ I called my family, I called my friends, I told people at work, no one could believe it. They said you have the worst luck–this is crazy.”
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Sure enough, he called back to say he’d found the ordinance on the books. “It’s a law and you can get ticketed for it,” says Edwards. “I guess it’s one of those laws that a lot of people aren’t aware of.”
Of course a savvy publicist can find an explanation for any hokey ordinance.
In his teenage days Richard Pegue could never have imagined this, but there he was up on the auditorium stage at his alma mater, Hirsch High School, with the principal leading the cheers.
