City agrees to fix yearslong ‘courtesy’ tow problem. A judge still needs to approve the court settlement.

Our long municipal nightmare could be over.

The dreaded courtesy-tow system, the bane of so many Philadelphia drivers, looks to be finally getting an overhaul, with the city promising — in writing — to use its “reasonable best efforts” to stop losing your cars.

If that happens, gone will be the days of parking a Hyundai on 15^th Street, only to find it the following week in the middle of Washington Avenue with $120 worth of parking tickets on the windshield.

No more riding around in the back of a police cruiser in a futile attempt to locate a Honda that could be practically anywhere within our 142-square-mile city.

Who could forget the guy who was forced to pay nearly $1,000 to get his BMW off the auction block after it was courtesy towed into a loading zone, then impounded by the Philadelphia Parking Authority?

And the women who were pulled over by police in other states for driving their own “stolen” cars, even though they had actually been courtesy towed in Philly months earlier.

Now, a less infuriating system could be in the works.

After a protracted legal battle in federal court — and six years’ worth of Inquirer stories — lawyers for the city have tentatively agreed to fix the problem.

The city said in a settlement agreement filed in federal court last week that it will pay $750,000 to 36 courtesy-tow victims and start requiring tow truck drivers who participate in the city’s vehicle relocation program to keep track of where they unhook them. U.S. District Judge Joshua D. Wolson still has to sign off on the agreement.

“They will have a handheld device to record where they are deposited and that will go to a website,” said Joseph Kohn of Kohn, Swift & Graf, which represented the plaintiffs along with attorney David Rudovsky.

Under the terms of the agreement, the city is expected to partner with the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA), which already uses such technology, to create a citywide system similar to those in Chicago, Phoenix and other cities that maintain online databases of towed vehicles.

“Courtesy towing” is a Philly term to describe what the city formally calls “relocation towing.” It’s a notoriously dysfunctional process for moving legally parked vehicles to make room for things like special events, utility work or construction.

Some cars go missing for days or weeks. Others disappear forever.

Example of a courtesy tow gone wrong (it often goes wrong):

You legally park at the curb near your home in an area covered by your parking permit. That block, unbeknownst to you, subsequently becomes a temporary no-parking zone, say, for a construction project. When you return a couple days later, your car is gone. No one at the police department or any other branch of city government has any idea where it is.

You’re on your own.

This happens because the city allows private towing companies to handle much of the work, and those companies either fail to notify the police department where they dropped off the vehicles, or the information gets lost somewhere within an antiquated system of handwritten logs and fax machines. There is little accountability.

To add insult to injury, some of the towing companies will drop off vehicles in no-parking zones. Then, the PPA comes along and starts ticketing those vehicles, unaware that they had been courtesy towed to that location.

Lastly, the coup de grâce: Drivers who appeal those tickets are typically unsuccessful because they can’t prove to a hearing officer or a judge that they hadn’t parked there.

The problem got so bad that Comedy Central’s The Daily Show dedicated a segment to it in 2024.

But Mary Henin wasn’t laughing when she had guns in her face during a trip to the New Jersey shore in May 2020. Long Beach Island police ordered her and a friend out of her Nissan, claiming it had been stolen. She was handcuffed and sat by the side of the road for 45 minutes until police could determine that the car was hers.

“It was horrible,” Henin, a public defender, recalled on Monday. “We’re lucky we were only just detained at the end of the day.”

Turns out, Henin’s car had been courtesy towed months earlier for tree trimming. When she was unable to find it, she reported it stolen, as police often advise drivers. Henin later found it a few blocks from her West Philadelphia home and reported that to police, but they never took it out of the stolen-vehicle database.

The same thing happened a year later to Julia Lipkis, another Philadelphia courtesy-tow victim. She was pulled over by police in Virginia and wrongly accused of driving a stolen car.

Henin was one of the original plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed in 2021 alleging that the courtesy-tow process is a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

“It’s a taking of property and a due-process violation,” said Kohn, the plaintiffs’ lawyer. He said he first learned of the problem in The Inquirer.

Under the proposed new system outlined in the settlement, the PPA would first put stickers on cars before they are courtesy towed, so its parking enforcement officers will know not to issue citations if a vehicle ends up in a no-parking or metered area.

Henin said she’s relieved that the city has finally moving forward with fixes to a system that has been broken for so long.“ I’m just hoping we can see them implemented quickly,” she said.

Ava Schwemler, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department, declined on Wednesday to comment on the settlement.

“While the litigation has been settled, we remain at work finalizing all of the process changes that will follow,” Schwemler wrote by email. “The City will provide additional information in the near future about the changes that are occurring.”

PPA spokesperson Marty O’Rourke said the parking authority is willing to assist the city “in any way that it can.”

“At this point, there has been no formal operational agreement with the PPA,” O’Rourke said.

It’s not clear when courtesy towing in Philadelphia got so bad. The Inquirer began reporting on drivers’ Kafkaesque experiences in January 2020, but the problem likely goes back much further.

City Hall has consistently ignored the problem, and, for years, refused to acknowledge that it even exists.

When Henin and three other vehicle owners filed their suit, the city tried to settle the case by offering them each $15,000, instead of fixing the systemic issues. Two plaintiffs took the money, but Henin and another driver moved forward with the suit.

Dozens more drivers with similar stories later came forward and filed a second lawsuit. They considered pursuing a class-action case.

Still, the city would not budge. In legal filings, lawyers for the city argued that it wasn’t responsible for the missing vehicles because they had been towed by private companies.

“[T]hey do not claim an injury that is fairly traceable to the City,” Anne Taylor, chief deputy city solicitor, wrote of the plaintiffs in 2023.

In the fall of 2024, there was a glimmer of hope. City Council passed a resolution to “hold hearings to investigate” the practice of courtesy towing.

“Philadelphia drivers have been frustrated with the bureaucratic nightmare of getting their vehicles back, with some viewing courtesy towing as little more than a money making scheme,” read the resolution, which was introduced by Councilmember Jeffery Young.

Those hearings led to … nothing. They never even happened. No one has explained why.

In a pair of rulings in late 2024 and early 2025, U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg rejected the city’s arguments to have the case thrown out. The two lawsuits were later consolidated.

Goldberg ruled that because the city distributes the temporary no-parking signs that precede most courtesy tows, it has a duty to keep track of the vehicles, whether they are towed by the police department, the parking authority, or a private company.

“I just don’t understand how a big city can have this issue,” Danielle Ditommaso, 27, whose Volkswagen Jetta was courtesy-towed from the Ben Franklin Parkway in 2022, told The Inquirer last year.

She never saw the car again.

Aarthi Manohar, co-counsel on the federal lawsuit, said she couldn’t comment on negotiations with the city or what led to the settlement. She commended the drivers who brought the case for sticking it out for five years.

“They knew the city could and should do better,” Manohar said. “They were willing to wait nearly half a decade.”