EDMONTON — People who can’t park drive Eli Dupuis mad.
There’s the “on the line” driver who parks so close you can’t open your car door. The “fancy car” driver who takes up two stalls because he doesn’t want anyone near his precious set of wheels. And there’s the “illegal location” driver who steals a spot designated for the handicapped.
Dupuis, an Edmonton website developer and creator of iparklikeanass.com, has been posting photos and tagging all types of bad parking jobs on his website for more than a year.
Last spring, he started tucking his own personalized parking tickets under the wipers of offending vehicles.
“Hey, Donkey . . . Start showing some respect for your fellow parkers . . . You’ll have more friends,” says one version of the ticket, adorned with a mythological half-car, half-mule graphic.
“Trust me, this ticket is much less embarrassing than your blatant disregard for your fellow parkers,” says another ticket. “You brought shame to yourself (and possibly your family, if they are with you right now).”
Although Dupuis sells the tickets on his website, it’s not a business venture. He says he and his wife, Jessa, a graphic designer, came up with the idea as a way to vent their frustrations over bad parking. It’s now become a pastime.
“It’s more public shaming,” says Dupuis. “If I came back to my car and it had a ticket on it . . . it would probably make me think twice.”
Dupuis says he gets strange looks from passersby when he’s handing out his tickets but has so far avoided confrontations with vehicle owners. And he prefers it that way. He simply slips a ticket on a car, snaps a quick photo and walks away.
Other frustrated drivers have been sending him photos of bad park jobs across North America and even Europe.
Dupuis says he recently removed the photo tag “should be beaten” from his website. It was meant as a joke, but he doesn’t want to promote violence.
Tom Keenan, a computer expert at the University of Calgary, says it’s all fun and games until someone takes it too far.
He knows of a woman in Edmonton, angry at a driver who cut her off, who hacked into a computer system and cancelled the driver’s auto insurance.
“That’s clearly going over the line.”
But Keenan acknowledges people have a fundamental need to express themselves and sometimes bureaucracy hampers other avenues.
One alternative route is for people to take the law into their own hands and try to shame the person publicly.”
Following Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riot in June, an online public shaming campaign helped identify people who set fire to cars, smashed windows and looted stores.
Keenan says, as a professor, he’s also subject to Internet scrutiny on grading websites. So are school teachers and doctors.
But driving and parking tend to get people really hot, he says. “I’ve certainly thought about . . . putting a piece of paper under someone’s windshield. Like ‘how many parking spaces do you need, buddy?”’