Warming up your car gets you a ticket?
In Michigan, People Need to Be Careful Warming Up Their Car
When it is cold out in the morning, you know just how uncomfortable it is to step outside of your warm home and get into a vehicle that doesn’t feel much better than the snowy and miserable outdoors. Therefore, many people who live in cold and snowy environments like to go out and start their car so it can warm-up for a few minutes before they get inside. In fact, some vehicles even have remote start that can help to serve this purpose. Depending on where you live
, though, you might want to hold off on using this.
What Happened?
That’s right, there are certain places where it is not legal to warm up your car if you are not inside of it – even if for a few minutes. While getting ticketed for leaving your car running in the winter to warm it up is not something that you hear about often, it does happen. In fact, Nick Taylor, who is from Roseville, Michigan actually received a ticket in early January 2017.
According to Taylor, he had driven to his girlfriend’s house where he was going to go inside and drop off diapers. Because he did not plan to be in the house for a long time, and he did not want the car to get cold again, he left it running. He was only inside for a few minutes before returning to the vehicle, where he noticed that it had a piece of paper on the windshield. He found that he had a ticket for $128 for leaving the vehicle unattended while it was running and the keys were in the ignition. He estimates that he was inside for about seven or eight minutes only.
Why Do They Ticket for This?
You might be wondering just why they would issue a ticket for this. After all, this doesn’t seem as though it is hurting anyone. Some might believe that it is to help cut down on pollution, but that’s is not the case. The fact of the matter is that police in many different jurisdictions will ticket for leaving the car running, even if it is in the driveway, if the keys are in it and no one is around it. They do this because they worry about theft.
In the case of Nick Taylor, the Roseville Police Chief James Berlin said that it was a public safety concern. He told CBS Detroit that “All it takes is someone to hop in his car and take off. Then there’s the chase often at a high rate of speed and all that could have been prevented.”
Those who have remote starters for a vehicle will want to check and see what the legalities are in their locations. They will also want to see if there are any laws against idling with the keys in the car in their location. It is always better to be safe than to be faced with a fine.