Ticket

Washington D.C.

I stayed last night at a friend's place in Washington D.C. I spent a decent amount of time last night looking around at parking signs in the area to decide where I could/should park, and finally settled on this place:

(Picture taken in the morning)

Seems like it should be a good place to park, right?  As long as I'm out there before 11:30am, 2 hours after the 2-hour parking starts, I'll be fine.

Wrong.

I got up this morning, took a shower, packed up my stuff and went out to my bike, and found this on it:

As usual, click to get a bigger version.

Wait a second, what? $100 parking ticket? I looked around to check that I hadn't missed anything last night. I checked the sign again - here's a closeup:

Nothing there about no parking between 7 and 9:30, like the ticket says. I went across the street and didn't see anything... and then I went down the street a little ways, and found this:

In case you can't read that top sign (and honestly, it showed up clearer in this picture than it is in person), the top one says "No standing or parking 7am to 9:30am Monday-Friday."

Awesome.

Aside from the fact that the sign I'm parked under said nothing about the morning no parking, I'm not sure I even would have been able to read this sign at night if I had walked down the street to check every single parking sign.

(Incidentally, I was parked right next to a driveway, and if you go to the other side of the driveway, the sign there also doesn't say anything about no parking 7-9:30 - you have to go one sign further down to find that.)

So now I get to spend my morning learning how to contest a D.C. parking ticket. And being thankful no one hit my motorcycle in morning traffic while I was blocking an entire lane.