Stu Bykofsky: With 'drive-by ticketing,' who are the real hacks?

I LOOKED AT my watch and my watch looked at me.

5:22 p.m., the watch said, and I could hardly believe my luck. I pulled into the parking spot on South below 13th that switches from metered to free at 5:30 and parked the PT Cruiser. I thought about dropping a quarter in the meter, but decided the risk was minimal.

When I returned the next day - you know what's coming - I found a party invitation on my windshield from the Philadelphia Parking Authority.

OK, you win some, you lose some. I mailed in the $36 fine because I gambled and lost.

If every arm of government was as ruthlessly efficient as the PPA, the city would have a billion-dollar surplus instead of a billion-dollar deficit. My story illustrates that when PPA nails me righteously, I pay up. Fair's fair.

What's not fair is the "drive-by ticketing" that some taxi drivers complain about.

That's what happens when a parking-enforcement officer sees a real (or imagined) violation and writes a ticket. Instead of handing it to the driver, or tucking it under the windshield wiper, the officer turns it in and it is mailed out. This also happens to motorists like you.

The "drive-by" ticket might first go to the fleet owner to determine who was driving the cab. The owner might hand it to the driver or send it back to PPA, which re-mails it to the driver. (This almost sounds like a government make-work program.)

Tickets not paid within 15 days get socked a late penalty of $20. Drivers say they sometimes don't even receive the ticket within 15 days, which sticks them with a late fee even when they were ready to pay. Fines for most violations in Center City and University City are $76, and the most "popular" violation is stopping in a no-stopping zone.

Philly cab drivers Ron Blount, 49, and Ajibade Obafemi Animasaun (a 54-year-old Nigerian emigrant who says, "Call me Femi," and most people do) work 12-hour shifts. As with other hacks, the first eight hours go to covering expenses, including paying the owner of the cab. The next four hours' work is their profit.

Pushing a Ford Crown Vic through traffic from sunrise to sunset is a hard, dangerous job, bound to result in some legit tickets, which hacks pay as a business expense. But they hate "drive-by tickets."

Why does the ticket-writer put it in the mail? I asked Blount if the PEO might be afraid of drivers.

"Afraid? They're not afraid of us," he said. "They boss us around."

Both Blount and Femi suspect that most "drive-by tickets" are written by the same few PEOs. PPA deputy executive director Linda Miller says that the agency can't determine if one PEO is out of line, and needs taxi drivers to name them.

Drivers also complain of being caught in a cross fire between the courtesy that is demanded of them by PPA and the reality of PPA enforcement on the street.

As an example, let's say Femi pulls into a no-stopping zone to help an elderly woman passenger from the cab to her front door, 10 feet away from his cab. He can be ticketed.

But if he pulls over in a legal spot a half-block away, the passenger can complain. Again, he can get a ticket.

That's a nice Catch-22, but not the only one.

Almost three years ago, Philadelphia taxi owners were ordered to install the Global Positioning System. Before any driver begins his shift, he swipes his ID card, and from that instant, the VeriFone TaxiTronic system can tell who is driving and where the cab is. Scientifically.

Let's say a hack gets a "drive-by ticket" for being at 4th and South at the same time GPS shows him at 17th and Spring Garden. Or GPS logs show a taxi leaving the airport a mere 10 minutes after being ticketed at Front and Juniper. These examples, pulled from GPS logs, were given to me by driver Steve Chervenka, 48, who's also political director of the Unified Taxi Workers Alliance of Pennsylvania.

If GPS logs say you were here, you were not there and the bad ticket should be a snap to beat.

Except - the place you go to fight violations, the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication, at 9th and Filbert, doesn't accept GPS logs as proof.

Aw, come on!

To me, that's like a criminal court excluding DNA evidence.

Jim Ney, director of the PPA's Taxicab and Limousine Division, tells me that he's aware of the complaints and concedes that the BAA hearing examiners - who work for the city Finance Department and not the PPA - "don't understand what it's all about."

The taxi division is planning to chew on some of these issues at a board meeting tomorrow, and Ney hopes "to be able to work something out."

PPA should, because the current system unjustly puts the screws to hardworking hacks.

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/byko.