Imagine living in a neighborhood where the road is pretty narrow, but it’s illegal to park on the street. Imagine the road being so narrow that if cars were parked on both sides of the street, there would barely be enough room for cars to drive down the street.

You might see how that could be a big problem, especially on a busy street.

The homeowners in this story understood that problem, and they also understood what they needed to do so that it wouldn’t be a problem.

Unfortunately, they all got parking tickets, but complying with the law made traffic a nightmare.

Keep reading for the whole story.

The parking rules

My step-dad used to live on a fairly busy, but rather narrow road.

Most of the people that lived on said road worked unusual times, and so some cars would be parked on the road during morning and evening rush hours (garages weren’t very common in this area as the houses were very small).

Now, since most of the residents knew that their narrow road was a fair major thoroughfare, they would all park halfway up on the pavement, leaving enough room for two-way traffic to get through comfortably.

This is technically illegal here, but nobody cared as it helped the traffic and there wasn’t another comfortable way to do it.

But then they found out what happens when you park illegally.

Until one day, my step-dad walks outside to find a parking ticket on his car.

Up and down the road he looks, and every car has a brand new parking ticket.

He got together with some of the neighbors, and sure enough they all had tickets for the same reason: parking halfway up on the pavement.

They went down to the local police station and were told that nothing could be done as it was technically illegal, so they would all have to pay the tickets.

Complying creating another problem.

So they did.

And the next day they all parked in the road, as the letter of the law says is required.

The road was juuust wide enough that they could legally park cars on both sides of the road inline with each other, which they did, leading to it being difficult to even get one car down the middle, let alone the normal two-way traffic that came through there at rush hour.

This would be annoying, but it worked in their favor.

The next day, a traffic cop came down to ask them to please park halfway up the pavement as it was heavily disrupting traffic.

Cue the parking tickets that everyone kept coming out to prove to the cop that they were just following both the letter of the law as well as the police stations own rules.

Apparently they did come to a more formal agreement with the local police to be able to park up on the pavement, but my step-dad moved away soon after this so I can’t say for certain.

I did drive past there a while ago though, and most of the cars are indeed parked halfway up on the pavement.

By complying, they proved why they needed to break the law.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an apartment tenant who is being called petty for blocking her parking space with trash cans.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I assume it was a different police officer.

Here’s an idea!

I’m assuming they didn’t.

The police officer clearly shouldn’t have given them parking tickets. Obviously, they had a very good reason for parking where they were parking.

At least it all worked out well in the end and they were able to park the way they needed to.

I’m wondering how bad traffic was though when the road was so narrow that cars couldn’t get by. It had to be pretty bad for the police officer to ask them to move their cars even though they were parked legally.

When everyone is breaking the law, there’s often a good reason.