A Virginia man made the local news this week after he drove a Toyota Corolla through a State College parking-garage gate.
But the problem is hardly new for the borough parking office, which deals with people driving through downtown parking-garage gates about three times a month, borough parking Manager Charles DeBow said Thursday.
‘People break gates all the time,’ he told StateCollege.com. ‘They run through them a lot — all intentional. …
‘(But) we catch pretty much all the people who do it,’ DeBow added.
That’s because the borough’s big three downtown garages — on West Beaver Avenue, South Pugh Street and South Fraser Street — are all equipped with cameras that can capture license-plate images.
DeBow said most of the gate-breaking incidents happen late at night. The bulk of them happen at the Fraser and Pugh garages, he said.
In the Fraser-garage incident reported this week, the Virginia motorist told police he tried three times — unsuccessfully — to insert his parking card into a gate-opening machine. He said he drove through the exit gate after it refused to cooperate, according to a police report.
The man had assumed, he told police, that no one would be available to help him if he had called for assistance. Borough surveillance footage shows that he drove through the gate at 1:01 a.m. Tuesday. (That’s a couple hours earlier than what an initial police report had indicated.)
But borough-staff help was available at that hour, as it is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, DeBow said. He said staff members are always available to answer queries via the ‘Help’ call buttons built into ticket-taking devices.
‘It’s not like he hit the call button and we didn’t answer,’ DeBow said.
An investigation into the Tuesday incident was ongoing earlier this week. DeBow said fixing a broken parking-garage gate can cost as much as $1,600, though the repair cost is often closer to $700.
The borough typically recovers gate-repair costs from the offending drivers, DeBow said. The driver involved in the Tuesday incident on Fraser Street has said he’s willing to cover the damages, according to the police report.
Earlier coverage
