Premium parking
The cars of some people who watched the 1 to 4 October Aftershock Festival at Discovery Park in Sacramento, California, USA, were towed away, with one owner complaining that when he retrieved his vehicle from an impound lot, it was badly damaged and undriveable.
Bruce Capagli told CBS Sacramento his car was no longer at the festival parking lot on Bercut Drive when he returned after watching the rock, punk and metal concert.
Capagli saw a sign directing him to call a phone number. The person who answered his call then referred him to an auto body shop on Del Paso Boulevard. From that office, he was brought to a dirt field in a residential neighborhood where he was presented with preprinted receipts demanding $562 to retrieve his vehicle, the New York Post (NYP) reported.
An affidavit Capagli saw indicated Allied Universal as the party that requested the towing of his car. However, when he called the company, he was told that it was not responsible for the parking facility and did not contract towing services, according to NYP.
Further, the receipt for the $562 charge did not have his vehicle identification number or the times the car was towed and released.
Meanwhile, a woman selling and leasing parking slots in a residential block in Changsha, Hunan province, China, was sued by homeowners who complained that her rent and selling price were unreasonably high.
The woman surnamed Wu charged 500 yuan per month for a parking space, twice the original rent set by the property developer in 2018, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.
Wu also sold parking spaces for 100,000 yuan, 80 percent higher than their original cost, according to SCMP.
In their lawsuit, the complainants, who had no place to park their cars, demanded that the developer’s sale of 196 parking slots to Wu for 14 million yuan in 2018 be annulled.
The court ruled in Wu’s favor, however, saying that her purchase of the parking slots was legal and that the plaintiffs did not buy the space when it was offered to them by the developer.