DC's 'Phantom Tickets' Top AAA's 'Worst' List for 2014

The end of the year brings out all sorts of top lists, and AAA Mid-Atlantic did just that, looking back at 2014’s best and worst in transportation issues.

At the top of it’s “bad” list? DC’s practice of issuing tickets to innocent drivers.

Read: Report Shows DC Made $83 Million in Traffic Tickets Last Year

Here’s the scoop from AAA:

Unfairly Ticketed? IG Report Confirms Sneaking Suspicions. Nothing upsets or outrages motorists more than getting a parking ticket or a red-light or speed camera ticket they feel they didn’t deserve, or to receive a ticket for a vehicle they never owned. Yet, as many motorists have long suspected it routinely happens in the District of Columbia.

The trouble is it wasn’t by mistake in many instances, nor was it a simple bureaucratic blunder. It was intentional. A blistering report released by the District of Columbia Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that motorists in the city are presumed guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, that tickets were issued to drivers who never entered the city, and that although ticket reviewers in the city cannot distinguish which car was speeding on multi-lane roads in the city, they were still issuing tickets to innocent drivers.

In addition to revealing the odd practice of phantom ticketing, this eye-opening report by the OIG exposes the fact that ticketing agencies routinely have recklessly disregarded and routinely trampled the rights of motorists with unmitigated gall in their zeal to increase ticket volumes (2.8 million tickets) and revenue (nearly $200 million) for the city’s coffers.

Also on AAA’s “naughty” list? DC’s parking practices. Here’s what AAA has to say about it:

Parking Minimums. After a tedious process that included 50 public hearings and took seven years to complete, the District of Columbia Zoning Commission has voted to approve the Office of Planning’s first major rewrite of the city’s comprehensive zoning regulations in more than half a century or since 1958.

Some District residents are irked that the rewrite contains language that jettisons mandatory parking minimums for new retail and office spaces and large apartment buildings in downtown D.C. Opponents, including AAA Mid-Atlantic, say this empowers developers to decide how many parking spaces they will provide near transit sites and in new developments downtown.

If kept intact, it will only exacerbate the sheer scarcity of curbside parking in a city that has issued more than five million parking tickets (5,567,319) and collected a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue ($264,881,001) from parking tickets in the past three years.