December 2005 –

Where Space is Scarce:
Street Parking in Paris

His wife stood helplessly at the curb, ostensibly to guide him, as a frustrated Frenchman inched forward and back, again and again, trying to escape his tiny prison of a parking space. But the Fiat was trapped, with just centimeters to spare at each end. I could have stopped, but how could I help? Three hours later, the couple was gone, but the car was still there.

It is a fate too common in Paris. Not just that of being boxed in by other drivers, but of innumerable hassles related to the parking of automobiles. In a metro area more densely populated than New York City’s, the narrow streets and major boulevards teem with displays of stunning ingenuity in parking, with cars wedged at impossible angles onto every available patch of the street, curb, or crosswalk.

Similar creativity goes into avoiding the penalties for illegal parking. Motorists caught overstaying their welcome at paid parking spaces, or not paying at all, incur a penalty of just 11 euros (about 13 U.S. dollars). It’s an amount insignificant enough that many drivers choose to risk a ticket, rather than pay the 1€ to 3€ per hour it costs to park legally. It’s also tempting to ignore tickets, especially for tourists and expatriate workers who don’t know the laws, or believe they’ll escape punishment when they leave the country.

But the stakes rise rapidly. Failure to pay by the initial due date, 30 days after the ticket is issued, increases the amount due from 11€ to 33€. Further non-compliance can bring the amount owed for one offense to 100€. For the worst offenses, such as blocking a fire station, the initial fine is 35€, rising to 375€ after the first due date. Debt collection is handled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, a unit of the national government, which can confiscate funds for an overdue balance from the offender’s bank account. Travelers have been stopped at the airport and prevented from leaving the country, when their passport numbers turned up records of unpaid parking tickets.

When his checking account was flagged for collection of 960€ in unpaid tickets, computer consultant Michael Cerulli fought back. The 38-year-old expatriate from Southern California devised one of various schemes he calls “ticket busters.” He drained the account balance to near zero. Now each month he transfers just enough cash into it to pay his bills, letting the balance go briefly negative so there’s nothing for the city to take out. His other deposits go into a life insurance bank account, which can’t be touched legally.

Mr. Cerulli could have simply closed the account and taken his business to another bank, he acknowledges. Others do that, but they're soon tracked down—the collectors have access to information from the nation’s central banking system. “There is no way to be discrete,” he says.

Foreign-based drivers who believe they won’t be pursued across borders, he says, may have made a good bet. Non-French license plates are a bit like diplomatic immunity. When his BMW needed new plates, Mr. Cerulli showed up with just an old set of California plates for the car, offering them as “proof of registration.” Many private businesses in Paris are authorized to make license plates on the spot, for a fee, by verifying proper registration and then stamping the state-assigned tag number onto a blank metal template. At a shop that he found to be lax about the rules, Mr. Cerulli requested that the new plates be imprinted with his old California tag number.

“They didn’t seem to care, as long as they got their money,” he says. His cynicism was further confirmed when he asked the shop to use a certain lettering font normally reserved for cars owned by Brits. With its British-looking plates, his car now is usually ignored by the ticket-writing agents of the Paris police, who think it’s futile to go after a foreign-registered car. And if it’s ticketed, the car is effectively untraceable.

France has had problems with collecting traffic and parking fines from foreign motorists, admits Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s Minister of the Interior. The nations of Europe are devising a continent-wide registry to prevent foreign drivers from escaping the fines, to take effect in 2006. Mr. Sarkozy is a likely candidate for the presidency of France in the 2007 election.

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Watching the removal of an illegally parked car from the streets of Paris, especially from a tight spot, is like witnessing an efficient pit stop at a NASCAR race. A burly civil servant arrives in a tow truck, jacks the car a few centimeters off the ground, and slips a small set or casters (like a mechanic’s creeper) under each rear wheel. Single-handedly he muscles the car’s rear end out onto the street, hooks it up, and in a flash he is gone. The owner's cost to retrieve the car, aside from fines for obstructive parking or delinquent citations, will be 135€.

Many a motorist has returned from a night at the brasserie to find his car immobilized by the Sabot de Denver. Yes, the dreaded Denver boot has found a role in Paris. Often it's used to prevent someone from driving, by a motorcycle cop who can't give the driver a lift.

Not even the Prefecture de Police—the Paris police department—knows exactly how many parking tickets are written each year, says Hugo Mahboubi, its press spokesperson. But approximately 3 million fines were paid in each of the past several years. "As a percent of the total, who knows?" he said.

One thing is certain— it’s a cat and mouse game that keeps a lot of people employed. On a cool October morning, about a dozen ASPs— Agents de Surveillance de Paris—were staging for a day’s work outside an unmarked circulation (traffic) office near the Montparnasse Cemetery in south-central Paris. Most are women, and they are city employees but not police officers. The city employs perhaps 2,000 of them, one of them estimated. Their authority allows them only to issue citations, for parking violations and for petty offenses such as littering and failing to clean up after a dog.

“France is a land of many laws, but it’s not big on enforcement,” observes Richard Erickson, a Canadian expat since 1976, whose apartment nearly overlooks the Montparnasse station. Mr. Erickson produces metropoleparis.com, a site with acerbic commentary about life in Paris.

“The bloody Romans started it,” he says. Laws began to proliferate when France was part of the Roman Empire. Later, the kings of France added laws of their own. Louis XIV centralized tax collection, requiring a voluminous tax code. In the 19th century, Paris put a tax on all goods entering the city, using customs gates. The Montparnasse district itself was outside of city limits until 1860, and not subject to the tax. City dwellers resistant to regulation would frequent Montparnasse to dance and drink tax-free at the cabarets.

Parisians today so abhor parking fines that every presidential candidate since Mr. Erickson’s arrival in France, he says, has promised some sort of amnesty for unpaid tickets. “They consider it chickenfeed, and it yields a lot of votes.” Most candidates have kept their promises. As a result, some drivers have come to bank on eventual amnesty, accumulating tickets and sticking them in a drawer.

The French aren’t in love with parking meters either. The city abandoned the coin-operated type, after seeing too many of them bashed and plundered by indigent youths who stream constantly into the city (from Romania, many Parisians say). Installed instead on most every block are vending machines that dispense time-stamped tags for display on the dash of a parked car. The tags permit only two hours of parking at a time, usually, at a cost from 1€ to 3€ per hour. The machines accept only magnetic debit cards sold at the corner “tabac,” or tobacco shop, for either 10€ or 30€.

Unintentionally ensnared by the system, however, have been tourists, many in Paris for the first time and unacquainted with the drill. First they must find one of the mysterious machines, labeled with a “P” for parking, located perhaps a hundred meters or more from their own car. The instructions are in non-verbal graphics, but are cryptic nonetheless. (What kind of card is that in the drawings?) The machine won’t accept even the local currency, they find, let alone Japanese bills or a credit card. So when they return from shopping on the Champs-Elysee, they find a citation for unpaid parking.

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Parisian plumbers, property managers, and delivery people must go where they are needed, often in congested areas, on short notice. So while their white work vans sprawl brazenly across crosswalks and sidewalks, taking away the last vestige of walking space, pedestrians are so inured to it that they don’t appear to mind a bit. Savvy drivers of work trucks sometimes leave their doors unlocked, in case the parking brake must be loosened and the vehicle rolled a meter or two in either direction.

If the anarchy and lax enforcement seem to breed disrespect, consider that a Paris-based weekly auto magazine once advised its readers to stop paying parking fines altogether. At least that was the buzz in comments (now web-archived) written by motorists in 1995. Journalists at AutoPlus don’t specifically remember their publication pushing for a boycott on the payment of fines, but they don’t dismiss the possibility. “It could have happened,” says Pierre Marie, an AutoPlus writer who wasn’t working at the magazine a decade ago.

More recently, he recalls, the legality of issuing parking citations under certain circumstances was challenged successfully in court. In 2003, a woman accumulated several tickets, then argued that she'd been unable to pay because the shops that sell debit cards were closed at the time. The judge agreed, but there has been no official change in enforcement policy.

(Critics have also expressed suspicion that the city’s ticket-writing agents work on commission. “I doubt it,” says Mr. Erickson, the wry critic. “If they did, they’d be working harder.”)

Motorists are increasing resentful toward the mayor’s office for its tough tactics to discourage driving to work, according to Mr. Marie. It began when Bertrand Delanoe became the Paris mayor in 2001. For example, designated bus lanes, also open to taxis and bicycles, reduced space available to private cars.

“They want to make life hell for drivers,” he says. The mayor isn’t their only antagonist. Hotel de Ville—the Paris city hall—houses many members of Les Verts ("the greens" political party), which supported Delanoe’s election to office. Many of the greens publicly embrace biking to work or riding to the Metro, says Mr. Marie, but they’re often spotted driving private cars and city cars.

Throughout the city, elegantly dressed men and woman can be seen bicycling their way through heavy traffic, with the abandon of New York bike messengers. But cyclists are a shrinking minority, says Mr. Marie. “It’s very dangerous.” (That’s obvious.) And when the humidity is high, even Metro riders arrive to work damp with perspiration.

“A lot of people have to drive,” he says. “There aren’t enough buses and trains to carry everyone.” True, some can be seen operating half-full, he admits. But even with the vast network of routes served, public transportation isn't available to everyone, particularly in the farther reaches of suburbia. And some suburban transit stations lack adequate parking.

As bad as it may look, traffic and parking problems in Paris have lessened in the past decade, says Mr. Marie, crediting the city hall for the improvements. “Parking is crazier in Marseilles,” he says of the nation’s second largest city, where enforcement isn’t so aggressive.

Making matters better in some ways, worse in others, will be a new light rail tramway that eventually will encircle Paris. The first part of the project, now under construction and scheduled for completion by 2007, will include a 20-kilometer segment of tracks running in each direction. The $240 million initial phase was conceived as part of the attempt by Paris, ultimately unsuccessful, to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. It will bring service to 19 new stops in southern Paris, carrying 100,000 passengers per day. Unfortunately it will displace about 6,000 city parking spaces.

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SIDEBARS

Parking in ‘Parkings’

The French word for street parking is stationnement. But for leaving a car in a paid lot or underground garage, the word is parking—the same as in American English, perhaps to remind the world that renting space for an automobile is an imported idea. Lots and garages are commonly referred as “parkings.” In the better districts of Paris, they charge around 20 or 22 euros per day. Perhaps the city’s highest rate is the 115.50 euros charged for a 12-hour stay in an underground garage connected to the Louvre museum of art. Paid parking establishments in Paris are listed and described in a 288-page book available for purchase at ParkingsdeParis.com

Smart Cars

You see them all over Paris, zipping around the Place de la Concorde and circling the Arc de Triomphe alongside Fiats, Renaults, and the omnipresent Mini Cooper. The fortwo is one of several models of the smart (too diminutive even for capital letters). It is a product of DaimlerChrysler, built in France. The two-door coupe is 2,500 cm (just over eight feet) long, and rated for fuel economy of 60.1 mpg (city and highway combined). The company is gearing for sales of a larger four-door model in the United States. An open-top smart roadster has hit the streets in Europe. Visit smart.com.

Write to me at  tom@larocque.biz