Austin Now Waives Your Parking Tickets If You Don't Drive Home Drunk

Here's a good idea: don't punish people for being responsible.

That's what Austin is now doing for people who let someone else drive them home when they're too drunk to drive themselves, reports KXAN. If you leave your car in metered parking overnight and incur a fine for going over-time, all you have to do is show proof that you caught a safe ride home with someone else to get out of it. Any receipt from a rideshare app, taxi or bus will do.

Overnight parking is an option offered at metered parking stations, but you don't always have the foresight to know when you're about to get crunker than a T-Pain acoustic session.

So, waiving the overnight fees when you get a safe ride home is a good, reasonable thing for cities to do if they want to remove as many temptations for drivers to get behind the wheel drunk as possible. Parking Services has been instructed not to tow any vehicles left downtown overnight as a result, so long as it's moved the next day.

"What we want to see is people being responsible," Parking Services Manager Jacob Culberson told KXAN. "We don't want people to feel pressure to drive."

Currently, Austin will only waive tickets in the downtown area, but already the city says at least one person a month comes in to take advantage of the fee waiver. Maybe they should extend it out to other neighborhoods, too, because it's a really good idea.