Victims of ‘courtesy tows’ have filed another class-action suit against Philly

Cars continue to disappear in Philadelphia.

How many? Hundreds? Thousands?

Some are discovered within minutes, having been towed just around the corner.

Others turn up weeks later, in different neighborhoods, with parking tickets fanned out on the windshield like a bad hand of cards.

The understaffed Philadelphia Police Department, while dealing with historic levels of gun violence, continues to send officers to drive around in circles looking for people’s missing cars and to take stolen-vehicle reports — understanding that the cars probably weren’t stolen.

Apologies are offered, but no solutions: Sorry, ma’am, your car was courtesy towed. Yes, it’s a bad system.

Despite years of complaints, Philadelphia officials have so far refused to address the city’s notoriously dysfunctional process for relocating legally parked vehicles to make room for construction, utility work, and special events.

In the long run, it could end up costing taxpayers.

Months after the city paid two courtesy tow victims $15,000 each as part of an ongoing federal lawsuit, five more victims recently filed a second suit, claiming their cars were towed and lost. Both suits are seeking class-action status on behalf of potentially thousands of victims.

“We filed this new case in the interest of keeping pressure on the city to address the issue and make substantive changes,” said Aarthi Manohar, a lawyer representing plaintiffs in both cases.

Any progress?

“The city hasn’t seemed interested thus far in any policy changes,” Manohar said.

» READ MORE: ‘Borderline illegal’: Courtesy tows remain Philly’s persistent parking nightmare

Courtesy towing — a Philly euphemism whose origin is unknown — occurs when the city authorizes the relocation of legally parked vehicles in areas that subsequently became temporary no-parking zones. The problem: The city often fails to track who moved the vehicles and to where.

Some cars have been towed to illegal spaces — such as the middle of Washington Avenue — then ticketed by the Philadelphia Parking Authority, then booted or impounded. With no documentation of the original tow, drivers are often unable to prove that they didn’t park in the illegal spot. They end up paying hundreds of dollars in fines and fees.

In 2021, for example, The Inquirer reported that one driver spent nearly $1,000 to recover his car from a PPA lot and prevent it from being auctioned off after it was courtesy towed from his legal parking spot in Center City and dropped off in a loading zone.

Drivers have also been pulled over in other states months after their cars were courtesy towed because Philadelphia police, after putting the license plates in the stolen-vehicle database so patrol officers might spot them, then failed to remove the cars from the database after they were found.

» READ MORE: Another botched ‘courtesy’ tow: Philly woman pulled over in Virginia for driving her ‘stolen’ car

The Inquirer has been documenting the problem for the last three years. Drivers continue to come forward with fresh horror stories. No city agency appears to have made any effort to address the problem.

Police and city officials declined to comment on the lawsuits Wednesday.

“It boggles my mind,” said Michael Smith, whose daughter, Mackenzie, had her 2013 Honda Civic towed in Fairmount last year. They are among the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit.

Mackenzie Smith said she called police in March when she discovered the car missing. Police didn’t have a record of it being moved. They told her to look around the neighborhood, which she did for a couple of hours.

“They had no idea where my car was,” said Smith, 24, a nurse who needs a car for work.

A police officer later took a stolen-vehicle report, and her father, who had gifted the car to her but remained the owner, filed a claim with his insurance agent. The insurance company reimbursed the family for the vehicle, and they put that money toward a used Subaru.

» READ MORE: ‘What a nightmare’: How Philly police, parking authority, and tow companies lose cars while ‘courtesy’ towing

A couple of weeks later, Mackenzie Smith got a call from a police officer: The car had been located on 23rd Street, with tickets on the windshield.

“He said I had 15 minutes to come get it,” she said.

She was in Phoenixville at the time, and couldn’t get there that quickly. The officer authorized another company to tow the car again to its lot.

Then, her father began receiving notices from the PPA that he owed more than $300 in parking tickets on the Honda. But the insurance company said the car was now its property, so the Smiths were not able to collect the tickets that had been left on the windshield — or even retrieve their belongings.

When the Smiths sought the stolen-vehicle report from police, they hit another wall.

“They said they didn’t have those records there and we’d have to go to City Hall,” Mackenzie Smith said. At City Hall, the office they needed wasn’t open at the time.

“It was just a hassle,” she said. “We ended up never getting any of the paperwork.”

Figuring he had no way to fight the tickets, Michael Smith ultimately paid the PPA.

The Smiths’ lawsuit alleges that the city’s relocation program has “no mechanism in place to provide notice to vehicle owners and operators after a courtesy tow or to ensure that tickets and fines are not assessed against them,” and that it deprives drivers of their vehicles without due process, in violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Robert Clendaniel, who joined the new lawsuit as a plaintiff, discovered in November that his Pontiac Vibe was missing from his spot near 10th and Pine Streets, where he has a parking permit. He searched for hours. Police had no record of the tow. So he filed a stolen-vehicle claim a few days later.

About a week after his car was taken, a police officer called Clendaniel to inform him that it had been found in South Philadelphia — nearly two miles away.

“Awesome. Great news. They say it’s down on Water Street,” Clendaniel recalled. “I immediately — and I mean immediately — get my shoes and jacket on and call an Uber. I get right to where he told me the car was. I look around. No car.”

In the approximately 15 minutes it took Clendaniel to get there, a driver from Freddy’s Towing had showed up and towed it again, four miles away to Southwest Philadelphia. Clendaniel ended up paying $141 to get the car back.

“I got zero explanation,” said Clendaniel, who provides tech support for Comcast. “I don’t understand why they don’t have records.”

He now uses an Apple AirTag to track his car.

Another plaintiff in the lawsuit, Matthias Wagman, took his courtesy tow case all the way to Philadelphia Common Pleas Court after his car was towed in 2021 and dropped off in a metered parking spot at 13th and South Streets, where it received seven tickets.

In November 2022, the judge told Wagman he was responsible for the tickets “because he had no written proof that his vehicle had been courtesy towed,” the suit alleges. He appealed and lost last month. The ordeal cost him $808, the suit said.

Manohar said two of her clients from the 2021 lawsuit accepted the city’s $15,000 offers last year, but two others rejected it. So both cases are moving forward. They have not reached the phase where a judge would decide whether to certify them as class-action cases.

» READ MORE: ‘Courtesy’ towing claims more victims during filming of Adam Sandler’s ‘Hustle’

“Our hope for this case and the previous case we filed is that simple, reasonable solutions will be implemented,” Manohar said.

Other cities have created searchable databases so vehicle owners can find their relocated cars. And the PPA itself has a database of cars it tows. But the PPA does not handle most courtesy tows. The involvement of private companies that may not relay the information to police appears to be a large part of the problem.

Whatever the fix, Michael Smith said the city has to start by not losing track of vehicles in the first place.

“If they just knew where the car was,” Smith said, “it could save a lot of people a lot of time.”