|
|
||
|
|
|
|
Four weeks later he received his first notice for an overdue parking fine, from faraway San Francisco, and within days he began receiving dozens of overdue notices from all over the state on a daily basis. Why? Because when law enforcement officers ticketed illegally parked cars that bore no license plates, they had been writing "NO PLATE" in the license plate field. Now that Barbour had plates bearing that phrase, the DMV computers were matching every unpaid citation issued to a car with missing plates to him. Barbour received about 2,500 notices over the next several months. He alerted the DMV to the problem, and they responded in a typically bureaucratic way by instructing him to change his license plates. But Barbour had grown too fond of his plates by then to want to change them, so he instead began mailing out a form letter in response to each citation. That method usually worked, although occasionally he had to appear before a judge and demonstrate that the car described on the citation was not his. A couple of years later, the DMV finally caught on and sent a notice to law enforcement agencies requesting that they use the word NONE rather than NO PLATE to indicate a cited vehicle was missing its plates. This change slowed the flow of overdue notices Barbour received to a trickle, about five or six a month, but it also had an unintended side effect: Officers sometimes wrote MISSING instead of NONE to indicate cars with missing license plates, and suddenly a man named Andrew Burg in Marina del Rey started receiving parking tickets from places he hadn't visited either. Burg, of course, was the owner of a car with personalized plates reading "MISSING."! Street Signs - Which Way?
There isn't any System
Reaction #3, has historically predominated among the public officials in charge of these things, but reaction #1 has occurred often enough to convince people there's some underlying plan when in fact there isn't.
The most famous system is Manhattan's grid (New York) of north-south avenues and east-west streets. In Lansing (Michigan), they have a system in place: Cul-de-sacs (dead-end roads) are named
circle, court, way, or place
In Guilford County, North Carolina, the system is: North-south streets : street; East-west : avenue (reverse of Manhattan logic); Diagonal : road; Dead-end streets : terrace, point, cove, dale or way; Short curved roads with ingress and egress from the same thoroughfare : circle. Means, there is no detailed national standard, One gross generalization is that long streets typically are called avenue, street, highway, road, etc., while short ones get terrace, court, place, and the like. But there are many exceptions even to this simple rule. The U.S. Postal Service, however, has decided suffixes aren't worth worrying about. It merely requests that street names be unique without regard to suffix, lest mail carriers be confused if the suffix is left off. The agency adds a few other reasonable guidelines, e.g., street names should sound dissimilar to one another to avert mix-ups. These rules appear to have been widely adopted by local officials. Links of Interest
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
FAQ
Disclaimer: All
information provided in these FAQ’s is deemed to be accurate by the author.
Due care has been exercised to ensure the veracity of this information
and guidelines. However, there may be error (s) and omission (s) and all
information is subject to change. GaramChai.com, and its affiliates do
not assume any liability for the information provided herein. The reader
is strongly recommended to confirm this information from official sources
and GaramChai.com asserts that the reader is totally responsible for the
use and application of the material provided here. This FAQ service is
provided as a courtesy to GaramChai.com's customers and website
visitors.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
GaramChai® 1999-2008 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
