In a scalding decision, Malone declared the violations unacceptable, the failure to appear troubling, the evidence that Petit Robert was mending its ways nonexistent. A “serious sanction’’ was being imposed:
Petit Robert, where patrons go for fine dining, was barred from providing entertainment for two nights, which meant that the 30-inch television over its tiny bar and the background music were turned off.
When the City of Boston acts on valet parking violations, though it seldom does, the official flogging is most often done with feathers: That blank television screen is among the most serious penalties the city has imposed.
This may explain why reporters observed wholesale violations outside restaurants in the city’s busiest restaurant districts between September and November.
On some weekend nights along Tremont Street in the South End and Boylston Street in the Back Bay, traffic often moves at a crawl, thanks to long queues of empty, double-parked cars outside busy restaurants.
Valet parkers, the Globe found, pay little heed to the requirement that arriving cars be quickly moved to garages or lots. They routinely ignore regulations that forbid double parking and taking up metered spaces. Some grab resident parking spots and even handicapped parking to squirrel away cars belonging to diners. Such violations make it even more difficult for local residents to negotiate already congested streets and park their cars.
And the companies ignore the rules with relative impunity: Indeed, when a City Valet employee working at Umbria on Franklin Street threatened to kill a traffic enforcement officer in 2007, the city listed the incident as “disrespectful behavior.’’ And the sanction for Umbria? “Probation’’ for six months, though there is no record city officials ever checked up on the restaurant.
In response to the Globe’s findings, Boston’s transportation commissioner, Thomas J. Tinlin, said recently that he has put together teams of police officers and traffic enforcement officers to target valet scofflaws during peak dinner hours. The crackdown began Dec. 15.
