The shortage of parking space in Tel Aviv has long caused many people to park their cars in imaginative ways. However, it seems that the municipality’s cash shortage has led its parking inspectors to issue no less imaginative parking tickets. In December 2004, Meir Segel parked his car in a garden on Habarzel St. in Ramat Hahayal in northern Tel Aviv. When he returned to his car, he was startled to find a parking ticket under his windshield wiper. The ticket charged him with “parking on the sidewalk”.
Segel exercised his right to demand a trial and appeared before the Court for Local Affairs charged with violating a Tel Aviv bylaw. Segel admitted to the facts, which were not in dispute, but pleaded innocent.
When the hearing opened, Judge Arie Sharabi admitted that at first glance this was an open and shut case. “At the opening of the hearing,” he wrote, “I innocently believed that the pictures presented by the accused in pleading innocent only improved the charges of which he was accused, in view of the expanded ruling on the definition of ‘sidewalk’. At the verdict stage, I’m not ashamed to admit that after examining the evidence in the pictures presented to me, and the other material placed before me, I had erred in my opinion of the accused, because the place where he parked his car did not in my opinion meet the definition of ‘sidewalk’.”
The parking inspector who issued the ticket testified that the car was parked “with all four wheels within the garden on top of the drip irrigation system.”
Both parties called the area in question a “garden”, said Judge Sharabi, and all that remained to be seen was if this was actually a sidewalk. Judge Sharabi examined the pictures, which showed that Segel had parked on a dirt area on which was placed a drip irrigation system for scattered trees. A two-meter wide sidewalk ran along the area’s left side, to the left of which were paved parking spaces A two-lane road ran along the sidewalk and parking spaces.
Judge Sharabi said the bylaw’s author neglected to include a definition of sidewalk, nor cited any sources, such as was done by the Ramat Gan municipality, for example. He ruled that a sidewalk had to meet the conditions of location (along a road) and utility (for the use of pedestrians). “Not every space alongside a street automatically becomes a sidewalk, but only the area intended for pedestrians.”
Judge Sharabi therefore ruled, “Under the test of logic and common sense, it is hard to imagine that an area strewn with drip irrigation systems, trees and so on alongside of which is clearly delineated paved path for pedestrians, will be used by pedestrians under the rule of utility. It would be odd for a reasonable person if a pedestrian would prefer walking in puddle filled mud where irrigation systems could suddenly soak him, when there is a paved sidewalk alongside the area.”
Judge Sharabi said, “The concept of sidewalk should have its etymological, usual and understood meaning in language used by people conforms with the legal definition of this concept.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on February 5, 2006