HOWTO get a car towed from your driveway
For those of us fortunate enough to live in a house or apartment with its own parking, the phenomenon of getting up in the morning (or coming home in the evening) to find a strange car blocking your driveway is a familiar, and minor, annoyance. Minor, that is, if you have an extra 30 minutes to deal with it.
In San Francisco:
- Call 553-1200, the Dept. of Parking and Traffic’s Driveway Tow Hotline.
-
Photo courtesy Irina Slutsky
- Press 1 for English (or other digits for other languages; Spanish and Chinese are also supported)
- Press 1 again, then 1 a third time.
- Report to the operator the location, make, model and description of the strange car, and give your phone number.
- A meter maid will show up within 10-30 minutes. If you’re not already downstairs (which speeds everything up), he or she will phone you at the number you gave. Interestingly, the MM will ask you to open your garage to prove it is a working garage and you aren’t just messing with people.
- The MM will only then call in a tow truck, which takes another 15 minutes.
Another thing I found out: the MM told me the car might have been stolen, as the rear window was punched out (something I hadn’t noticed) and the glove box had been rifled. Accg. to the MM, if the car had been reported as stolen, I would have had to wait until the police arrived to get the whole thing resolved — and that would have added at least another 30 minutes to the procedure.
Fortunately for me, there was no report on it. So they towed it away and I went on my way.
Now join me in singing the song of all unfortunate drivers whose cars have been towed (to the tune of “The First Noel”):
Towed away, towed away,
Towed away, towed away –
Where do you go when you’re towed away?
okay, good advice, but, though it doesn’t sound like it was the case here, i’d encourage everyone to look for a phone number left on the dash, etc, to make sure it isn’t a quick-stop situation. it sounds like this is a bigger complex, too, but for cars in drives in front of 3-flat or similar small buildings, please be a good neighbor and ring a doorbell before calling DPT.
i was HIGHLY miffed when some ass called in my car - especially because it absolutely was NOT someone who lived in our building who did it. there was ample safe pedestrian passage (meeting ADA standards, even), and that kind of tattle-taling just ain’t neighborly.
Yes, you’re right — be a good neighbor and peer inside the car to make sure there’s nothing to identify an owner. (I’ve gone so far as to get a guy’s name off a pay envelope, call his employer, and have the employer ring the guy’s cellphone to wake him up and get him to move his car.)
But just to be clear — this was a strange car entirely parked across the driveway of my own, single-family house, and preventing me from pulling my own car out of my own garage. So I knew it didn’t belong to me.
Either that, or be a good neighbor by NOT BLOCKING your neighbor’s driveway in the first place, LOL!
Wait, you know someone with a last name of Slutsky?
Yeah, checking the dash will, in my experience, endear you to your neihgbors who used the driveway as an auxiliary parking lot to their huge family.
In a related story, the Houston Chronicle — always good for a laugh — provides a tour of the city’s impound lot.
Anna-
“Wait, you know someone with a last name of Slutsky?”
Wait, you’re a blogger in SF and don’t know who Irina is? ;)
The DPT has great warning flier you can download, print and put on cars that block your driveway. At our house cars get the DPT warning flier the first time they block our driveway, a ticket the second time and towed the third.
I know- a few friends corrected me already- my bad. Sorry Irina!