San Vicente “Parking Trap” Nails Multiple Cars

A ticket for everybody! WeHo’s parking enforcement has struck gold. A San Vicente parking trap outside West Hollywood Park is nailing multiple cars with $53 tickets, catching visitors in a confusing maze of signs and a hard to find pay station. The location of the “parking trap” is painted yellow and allows cars to pull to the right side of the street and park on San Vicente Blvd.  We counted five tickets in a row.  In this particular swoop, every car that was parked got a ticket – all five of them. Two other cars had persons in the driver’s seat waiting, and one other handicapped driver did not get a ticket. Every other eligible car made the same “mistake” and got a $53 ticket.

Confusing signs and a single pay station hundreds of feet from the parking spots along the curb mean that, week after week, visitors to West Hollywood Park leave with a ticket. This signpost along the curb says No Parking: Monday through Friday 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. Underneath it says 1 hour parking at $2 per hour 8 a.m. to midnight. The sign on the post says No Parking: Monday through Friday 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Underneath it says 1 hour parking 6 a.m. to midnight. The two signs have different parking hours for the same spot. Plus the small posts are not lit for evening hours. No parking 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. is dominant and the 1 hour parking is also dominant. To pay for parking, you need to read the smaller print and then find the pay booth.  

The place to pay for parking is up the block. None of the posts point to where to pay at the parking station.    

Parking enforcement indicated this lucrative stretch of San Vicente issues multiple tickets on the weekends. The parking officer is equipped with a tablet that records the paid license plates, and the officer issues a ticket to all those who do not show any payment. If a person has paid for one hour and their meter expires for one minute, their plate will no longer appear on the tablet and they will be ticketed with no grace period.

Parking tickets are not small change in West Hollywood. In a recent budget update, City staff reported that projected parking fines would bring in about $7.1 million in the 2024 fiscal year, with another $7.2 million coming from parking meters. In 2023 the actual numbers for parking fines 7.1M and 6.6M from parking meters. For a city with operating revenues in the neighborhood of $150 million, that puts parking at just under 10 percent of the pie.

Under the city’s parking citation ordinance, parking penalties are set by City Council and all parking penalties collected by the processing agency “accrue to the benefit of the city.” That language lives deep in Section 10.12.060 of the municipal code, but you feel it on the street when a confusing block like this keeps generating fines, over and over.

The trap — and it is a trap, is what happens when parking enforcement sees repeated problems in a specific area and nothing gets done to clean up the signs or fix the layout. Drivers keep getting hit in the same spot, the city keeps collecting $53 at a time, and one short stretch of San Vicente turns into a quiet little revenue stream, instead of a clearly marked place to park by the park.