Love Philly? So do we. Let’s be friends. Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today.
When Luke Sitzler got a $51 ticket in the mail for parking on Chestnut Street near Broad, he couldn’t understand what rule he’d violated. He didn’t even remember stopping there.
“First you’re like, okay, I don’t even live over here, when would this have been?” he said. “And then they have the picture, you can see either me or my friend, standing next to my car, and I’m like, ‘okay, that has to be my friend’ — that’s the only reason I can think that I would have been over there.”
He thought about contesting the ticket, and as he did some research, he remembered that a few months earlier his sister had sent him information about a new type of parking payment system called CurbPass, which is only used in certain downtown loading zones.
His sister had told him to sign up, but Sitzler, who lives in Fishtown, didn’t see why he would need it. He thought, “Well, I don’t really park. If I’m going to Center City, I’m not going to drive,” he recalled. “I wasn’t sure if it was meant for just normal cars or if it was only for commercial vehicles. I don’t fully understand this, so it’s not a priority for me.”
But as Sitzler and tens of thousands of other drivers have learned the hard way, the new loading zone rules definitely apply to them.
If a vehicle that isn’t registered in CurbPass is parked for longer than about three minutes in zones along 23 blocks of Chestnut, Walnut and Sansom streets, an automatic camera system sends a report to the Philadelphia Parking Authority, where a staffer reviews the images and issues a ticket.
As painful as the fines are for unsuspecting motorists, since the system started up in May 2025 it has also won praise for giving delivery truck drivers and others more places to legally park on the curb. That discourages them from double parking, blocking buses and other traffic, and creating hazards for bicyclists, officials say.
Nearly 50,000 vehicles have been signed up for CurbPass and traffic speeds have jumped about 30% on Chestnut and Walnut, according to the PPA.
The zones allow 730 additional commercial vehicles a day to park on the target blocks — almost double from before — because drivers can find an open spot and do their deliveries more quickly. Registered vehicles are automatically charged 10 cents a minute and can stay for up to an hour.
“With ever-expanding usage — between delivery drivers, folks that are looking to pick up or drop off groceries, the famous Amazon deliveries — the demand on the curb is greater than it’s ever been,” PPA acting executive director Gabriel Roberts said. “The challenge for us was to figure out how best to make sure that there’s turnover at those loading zones, and that that in turn would improve the flow of traffic, especially in those high-density corridors in Center City.”
All the zones “in my dirty little town”
Center City has had different types of 20-minute and 30-minute loading zones for years, some for trucks only and others for passenger vehicles. But they have been swamped by the new era of easy online commerce, constant deliveries and ubiquitous Uber and Lyft rides.
The zones had become “outdated, antiquated,” Roberts said, in part because they depend on enforcement by PPA officers.
“A parking enforcement officer had to notice the vehicle in the loading zone, time it, come back, pick up the timing, issue the parking ticket, and then call a tow operator,” PPA deputy executive director Corinne O’Connor said. “If they didn’t come back for an hour or hour and a half, that car just sat. And people knew that we didn’t stand on the corner and come back in the 20 minutes, 30 minutes.”
In 2018, local rocker Kurt Vile celebrated Philly drivers’ indifference to parking limits in his song “Loading Zones” and the accompanying music video. It shows him boldly double-parking (in a crosswalk, no less) and committing other violations, and collecting a pile of tickets from two eager-beaver enforcement officers he mostly ignores.
“I slip and squirm through the cracks, creep around by all the loading zones in my dirty little town,” he sings. “Get my shopping done, laundry too… And all for free by mayoral decree.”
The year after Vile’s song came out, the city launched a pilot project on Chestnut Street creating new all-day loading zones with 20-minute limits, which led to less illegal parking and better transit travel times. In 2022, it tested a system from Google’s Sidewalk Labs that let drivers reserve space in 21 loading zones through an app. In 2024, City Council passed legislation authorizing camera-based enforcement of the zones.
The current Smart Loading Zone program uses technology from California-based Automotous. Each space has a street sign that says “Paid loading at all times” with a QR code that drivers can scan to sign up for CurbPass. A camera on a nearby utility pole monitors the spot.
“Now with the cameras, it’s seeing you the minute that you pull in and the minute you pull out, so it creates that turnover and relieves congestion,” O’Connor said. “It’s seeing you right away, and less people are prone to be like, ‘well, I just seen [the officer] walk up the block, so I know I got a while, and I’ll run out when I see them.’”
Lots and lots of images
The Automotous system scans the vehicle’s license plate and starts billing the owner 10 cents per minute. If the car or truck isn’t registered, and stays for longer than about three minutes, the system creates a package of information with snapshots of the car at the start and end of its parking session.
A room at the PPA’s offices at 7th and Market streets is full of staffers sitting at cubicles and looking at computer screens showing images of cars. Four officers spend much of their day clicking through the loading zone packages, verifying that the license plate scans and other collected data is correct, and issuing tickets. The system issues 200 to 300 reports per day, which each typically take 10 to 15 seconds to look over and approve, they said.
When officers come in on a Monday morning, 700 to 1,000 reports from the weekend have accumulated in the queue, waiting to be reviewed.
“I look at images every day. Lots and lots of images,” said Felicia Coleman, a former parking enforcement officer who is now the PPA’s supervisor of automated enforcement.
Sometimes confirming the ticket takes longer, for example when glare on the picture obscures a plate, the make or model of the vehicle aren’t evident, or a blurry image makes it hard to tell which state the plate is from, staffers said.
“At this point Pennsylvania is not the only one that has a white plate, so it would be difficult to distinguish if it’s not a clear picture,” Coleman said. If they can’t figure it out, “we have to relinquish it. We do not deliver a ticket.”
In addition to the avalanche of loading zone tickets that Coleman and her fellow officers review, they also handle automated tickets given by separate systems of red-light cameras, speed cameras, and bus- and trolley-mounted cameras.
While “the technology is always improving,” the process “highlights the importance of the individual behind that screen, checking on the work of the camera,” Roberts said. “They say ‘15 seconds’ and we can smile about it, but a lot of information is being taken in there, a lot of double-checking and just making sure that people aren’t being ticketed improperly.”
Since May 2025, the parking authority has issued 122,811 Smart Loading Zone tickets, an average of about 8,000 per month, spokesperson Janell King said. May 2026 saw the most violations, 9,681, although July could end up exceeding that figure once all the packages are processed.
The PPA has collected just shy of $5 million in ticket revenue from the program. Loading zone tickets are $51 and double-parking tickets are $76. Compliance has increased over time, with 78% of violators receiving only one ticket and then apparently changing their behavior, according to the PPA.
Earlier this year, City Council approved legislation allowing the agency to create smart loading zones across Center City without needing individual council approval for each one, and the agency is planning to create another 33 zones.
“Isn’t that what a loading zone is for?”
PPA officials say they made substantial efforts to get out the word about the new loading zones. Radio and TV stations ran stories, and the agency made social media posts and a web page about the program.
Yet many people didn’t hear about it, or it may have been buried among the many other developments in automated enforcement and road safety in the city. Recent news articles about loading zones have focused primarily on an ongoing dispute over bike lanes and planned neighborhood loading zones — which wouldn’t have cameras — along Spruce and Pine streets.
For some drivers, the very idea of metered zones doesn’t compute.
“I wasn’t even aware that the city had introduced paid loading zones,” said Kai Tremoglie, a public school teacher who got a ticket on Chestnut Street last year. “Even when I saw them later, I figured, well, if I’m there for 10 minutes, you know, isn’t that what a loading zone is for? I found it very frustrating.”
Tremoglie, a Roxborough resident, was picking up his girlfriend from work. There was no other street parking available nearby, he didn’t want to double-park, and he wasn’t about to pay $20 to park in a private lot for five or 10 minutes, he said.
“It’s not like I left my car. I was in my car, I had my flashers on. I was trying to make it known in case there was a PPA officer or a police officer who came by. They would know that I was there for a reason,” he said. “But with the cameras, there’s no nuance at all.”
He also questioned the brevity of the 3-minute grace period. PPA officials said a violation needs to kick in at some point to make the loading zone program work, and they were careful to design a grace period that would not result in penalties for very brief stops. “Just pulling up and someone jumped out of the car and you received the ticket — that’s not factual,” O’Connor said.
In addition, drivers are welcome to sign up for the program and pay 10 cents a minute, they say — although some people said they were ticketed while going through the online sign-up process, which can take more than 3 minutes.
Addressing rare challenges
Roberts acknowledged that the system isn’t perfect, and there are edge cases where people arguably shouldn’t have been ticketed.
Allison Getty, a teacher who lives in East Falls, said she was driving with her child on Chestnut last year when she experienced a migraine that impaired her vision. She pulled over in a loading zone to wait for her husband to arrive. A parking enforcement officer might have let her go, but the automated system gave her a ticket.
She appealed and received a denial 10 months later. She then submitted medical evidence to an adjudicator, and a year after she got the ticket it was finally thrown out, she said.
Getty said she understands the need for the loading zones, “but if you’re going to do that, then you have to have the capacity to address the issues that come behind it. I also don’t love that there’s some computer program identifying me and my car and my child, and saying that I broke a law where there’s no human involved.”
Another driver who was ticketed on Chestnut in May said he had parked in the loading zone, but the ticket was nonetheless invalid. He has Ring camera footage showing that his car was at his house a short time before the ticket was issued, making it impossible for him to have driven to the zone and parked for more than 3 minutes by the time indicated on the violation notice, he said.
While the ticket does appear to show before and after photos of his car at the loading zone, a closer look reveals that the car in the first photo was a slightly darker color and had an indistinct license plate — making for a very rare coincidence that tripped up the Automotus system.
Billy Penn provided a copy of the ticket to the PPA, which reviewed it and concluded it was “bad,” as one manager put it. The ticket would be canceled, she said.
“To the extent that errors happen, if we can reduce them and keep them to an absolute minimum, and hopefully they all resemble very strange outlier cases like this, then I think we’re doing our job, and we’re pretty satisfied with that,” Robert said. “And of course, any mistakes we do make, we’re going to rectify. We’ll make sure of that for sure.”
The post Philly’s smart loading zones are a boon or a plague, depending on who you ask appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.
Source: News – World – Philadephia – rss.app2 → manual entry
