should i pay it

April 26, 2006 1:55 PM

nyc parking ticket: do i need to pay it if I'm giving my car to my brother in a few weeks and he's taking the car out of state?

the car doesn't have any other outstanding tickets and I'm just want to know if I give the car away whether they will track the ticket back to me later. I'm going to buy another car too, is there any way this ticket gets back to me or my brother?

posted by alkupe to law & government (7 comments total)

The ticket is tied to you, not the car. If you don't pay it, it will come back to bite you eventually.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:01 PM on April 26, 2006

I don't know if it will come back to bite you or not, but the link has already been made between the owner of the car and the alleged crime. Who owns the car in the future has nothing to do with it.
posted by bingo at 2:03 PM on April 26, 2006

More specifically, the link has been made between the alleged crime, your name, and the address on file for you at the DMV, as well as your social security number. They may or may not keep chasing you for it, but they could. I got a parking ticket on a college campus in a state I don't live in, and they pestered me for about 10 years until I finally paid it.

Since you live in New York, if you ever run into trouble with the law again, an old unpaid ticket might be just the excuse the cops need to consider you a suspicious character and search you, harass you, whatever.
posted by bingo at 2:06 PM on April 26, 2006

If your name was attached to that license plate number at the time of the offense, then they make you pay it. You will be accruing penalties until you do. You probably won't be allowed to register your new car without first paying off your outstanding tickets. I just got a notice saying that they are going to be taking money out of my tax return to pay some parking ticket I apparently didn't pay 3 years and 2 cars ago. You have no chance to survive make your time.
posted by team lowkey at 2:07 PM on April 26, 2006

California
I wasn't allowed to transfer ownership of my car until my unpaid tickets were paid for.
posted by clh at 2:33 PM on April 26, 2006

Yeah, I had some friends in New York who had unpaid tickets on their car, and they couldn't transfer title until they cleared the tickets off. By the time they got that figured out, penalties had made an already hefty set of tickets even more astonishingly expensive. Just pay it off before the penalties come around to bite you in the butt.
posted by ambrosia at 2:42 PM on April 26, 2006

Why are there so many questions on how to get out of paying parking tickets?

Just pay the ticket. Pay it before it's due. That will keep it from biting you in the ass somewhere down the line. Out here, it'll ding the person that was the registered owner of the car. So yes, *you* could get in trouble for it later on, and it'll be more costly than it would have been if you just paid the ticket in the first place.
posted by drstein at 3:04 PM on April 26, 2006