“DO NOT TOW OR MOVE” will deter exactly zero tow truck drivers.
Shoot, being legally parked with all of your vehicle plates/tags/registration/etc in order isn’t enough to deter some tow truck drivers.
There’s a company in my area that actively, regularly engages in predatory towing. All they have to do is claim someone called about it and be unable to produce records because of some computer issue. If they choose their targets carefully, they either get:
A: free money
B: free salvage
Even if someone DOES manage to sue and win, that’s maybe 5% or less of the vehicles they tow. They seem to deem that an acceptable hit rate for free money.
Go ask anyone who tows inside the city limits of a major metropolitan area what percentage of vehicles get reclaimed after being towed.
If a company is willing to throw ethics out the window and drown the predatory tows in a flood of legitimate work, there’s apparently extra money to be made.
Worst case scenario the company that practices such things fires someone for “making too many mistakes on the job” and they go get a tow job elsewhere because there’s a massive shortage of tow trucks seemingly everywhere.
Much of the towing industry is a half-step above organized crime.
Hey if you are interested there could be some money in it for you. Talk to a lawyer about a class action. You could be the class representative and that would be nice.
That would require proving that the decisions to do predatory towing were made all the way up at the top and actually written down or typed out somewhere.
These are carbon-copy and cash register businesses that just happen to HAVE computers. A few with bigger fleets and GPS in the trucks run dispatch calls through computers, but most of them (from what I’ve seen myself and heard from friends/acquaintances who work in tow yards) don’t actually USE them for the day-to-day work.
Any attempt at a case stops at discovery.
The cops don’t care and there’s no real threat of meaningful punishment for the companies at fault so it’ll continue.
Thanks for the suggestion though. It’s a thought I’ve had previously and looked into.
Any attempt to regulate towing companies further that might cut into this kind of business will see another city-wide tow slowdown, though. Things were REALLY bad when our major metropolitan area started talking about passing idling laws and requiring GPS dongles.
There was a 3+ day to a week backlog of cars waiting for tow. Local law enforcement was cutting deals with individual companies just to get accidents cleared to the side. They’re all private businesses so they don’t HAVE to operate if they don’t want to.
Shoot, being legally parked with all of your vehicle plates/tags/registration/etc in order isn’t enough to deter some tow truck drivers.
There’s a company in my area that actively, regularly engages in predatory towing. All they have to do is claim someone called about it and be unable to produce records because of some computer issue. If they choose their targets carefully, they either get:
A: free money
B: free salvage
Even if someone DOES manage to sue and win, that’s maybe 5% or less of the vehicles they tow. They seem to deem that an acceptable hit rate for free money.
Go ask anyone who tows inside the city limits of a major metropolitan area what percentage of vehicles get reclaimed after being towed.
If a company is willing to throw ethics out the window and drown the predatory tows in a flood of legitimate work, there’s apparently extra money to be made.
Worst case scenario the company that practices such things fires someone for “making too many mistakes on the job” and they go get a tow job elsewhere because there’s a massive shortage of tow trucks seemingly everywhere.
Much of the towing industry is a half-step above organized crime.
Hey if you are interested there could be some money in it for you. Talk to a lawyer about a class action. You could be the class representative and that would be nice.
That would require proving that the decisions to do predatory towing were made all the way up at the top and actually written down or typed out somewhere.
These are carbon-copy and cash register businesses that just happen to HAVE computers. A few with bigger fleets and GPS in the trucks run dispatch calls through computers, but most of them (from what I’ve seen myself and heard from friends/acquaintances who work in tow yards) don’t actually USE them for the day-to-day work.
Any attempt at a case stops at discovery.
The cops don’t care and there’s no real threat of meaningful punishment for the companies at fault so it’ll continue.
Thanks for the suggestion though. It’s a thought I’ve had previously and looked into.
Any attempt to regulate towing companies further that might cut into this kind of business will see another city-wide tow slowdown, though. Things were REALLY bad when our major metropolitan area started talking about passing idling laws and requiring GPS dongles.
There was a 3+ day to a week backlog of cars waiting for tow. Local law enforcement was cutting deals with individual companies just to get accidents cleared to the side. They’re all private businesses so they don’t HAVE to operate if they don’t want to.