We came home from our two-week vacation to find that the Suzuki that Ken abandoned in our driveway over a month ago is still here. I thought for sure it would be gone. (Stupid post-vacation optimism.) When we pulled into the driveway and saw it sitting there, I felt totally angry and frustrated. But mostly angry.
Even though our neighbor Sondra already called the police over a month ago to report the problem, I thought I'd call again today to see what progress they were making in having the car removed. I spoke to a very nice officer that apologetically explained that since the car had been abandoned on private land, they had no authority to take action. Unless the car is parked on public land or was involved in a crime, there is literally nothing they can do about it.
Seriously???
This makes no sense to me. If British law prevents the police from taking action against negligent car owners that have abandoned their junked cars on private property, what possible deterreant is there to keep people from doing things like this all the time? Now, I can kind of understand why Ken kept parking his cars in our driveway. There are no legal or financial consequences, so why stop?
The only action we can take is to petition our local council to come out and tag the vehicle as abandoned. Optimistically, it will take a week to get them out here for the inspection. Then, the car has to be tagged with a public notice for two full weeks. After that, it'll probably talke another week or so to get the car towed away. So, the optimistic estimate is that it'll be a full month until the car is dragged away. The police officer warned me, though, that since we live "on the edge of the map" (translation: the boonies), the council will be very slow to act.
That doesn't surprise me. Everything out here seems to take about twice as long as my impatient American self thinks it should take. But if a local warns you that something is going to take a long time... Settle in for a spell, baby. You're in for a wait.
At this point, I'm tempted to just put the car in neutral and push it out onto the street. Or maybe try something like this:
3 comments:
That is just CRAZY! I like the idea of carefully pushing the car into the street/public area. In any case, that Ken is just BAD NEWS!
I'm totally with Lisa: get that car on the road somewhere! And where is your landlord in all of this? He should have it towed.
The landlord is a nice enough guy, but he just doesn't ever get anything done. Case in point: We *still* don't have our own garbage dumpster, even though we've been asking for him to add one to our trash service since the first day we moved in. The guy's got no follow-through.
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