I never wanted to own a car. A car to me is an annoyance at best and a costly hassle at worst: bumper-to-bumper traffic, “check tire” lights and, of course, parking. One thing I didn’t foresee was that through disputes over parking enforcement in Mt. Lebanon, car ownership would lead me to greater questions about police transparency, the point of local government and the nature of shared community. Yet, that is exactly what happened after I brought a car to a place its website describes as “a premier example of that phenomenon of modern American life, the ‘automobile suburb.’”
I was born in Moon and moved to Mt. Lebanon in 2024 with my wife to be closer to her work and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, which I attend. We share a car, and she relies on public transit to get to work. I’ve dedicated my time in law school to helping people facing structural inequities that overlap with the law; she works with adult, mentally handicapped individuals.
As a graduate student and public school aide, we are lower-income, and have used social programs like SNAP and LIHEAP. I understand the difficulties that can come from interacting with often labyrinthine government bureaucracies, and I have worked with clients who have had to overcome transportation hurdles because they don’t have a car. Unfortunately, when public transportation funding is at risk, a car has been both a luxury and a near necessity in a county that has seen a 36% public transit service reduction in the past 25 years.
When we first moved to Mt. Lebanon, we, like many other residents in the municipality, parked on the street. The township prohibits overnight street parking so that “it is easier for patrol officers to determine if a parked vehicle might pose a threat to residents,” according to its website.
A resident can request a Special Permit Parking Zone for a street through a complicated process — for $420 a year, six times the cost of a street parking permit in the City of Pittsburgh. Or a permit to park in one of the municipal lots can be purchased — for $1,020 — but that doesn’t guarantee you a space. For lower-income renters like us, this cost was prohibitive; furthermore, this law, unevenly enforced as it was, had a stated rationale that seemed odd to me in a community of dense streets and closely stacked apartments with no parking included.
Editor’s note: Many first-person essays published by Pittsburgh’s Public Source touch on the functions of local institutions. This essay went beyond the norm in detailing the writer’s interactions with an agency, the Municipality of Mt. Lebanon, and in exploring law enforcement and transparency concerns. The author also brought to the table both lived experience and legal scholarship. Public Source asked the author to supply documentation, which he did, and reviewed that material. Public Source also reached out to Mt. Lebanon officials, sending 11 written questions and following up by phone, but received no response by deadline.
It seemed even more odd when, leaving for school in the morning, I noticed that my car, along with others on my street of mostly apartment dwellers, being ticketed for violating this ordinance — even when cars on other nearby, almost entirely single-family-home streets, were not.
Wondering about overnight parking enforcement patterns, I made a request under the Right-to-Know Law to the Mt. Lebanon Police Department in late September 2024. The municipality responded that its officers have no pattern for targeting cars — enforcement was solely at their discretion.
As a law student, I know that a neutrally-worded law can be enforced unequally. Into 2025 police continued to ticket my street while neighboring streets were not. Increasingly enforcement felt less like “safety” and more like a tax that was levied on apartment dwellers.
“Through months of follow-up, I reflected on the irony that I didn’t even want a car in the first place. I did, however, want to know whether laws regarding cars were being enforced equally.”
Dan joyce
A flurry of response
After two specific Mt. Lebanon police officers ticketed my car repeatedly, I filed two complaints against them, requesting an investigation into uneven enforcement of the law. I also made further right-to-know requests regarding the municipality’s police enforcement practices.
Immediately, silence turned into a flurry of response: I frequently found my car singled out for ticketing. At one point, my car was ticketed multiple nights in a row while cars directly next to mine were not. My right-to-know requests were not only denied by the municipality — but, contrary to requirements in the Police Department Policy Manual, there was no follow-up regarding my officer misconduct complaints, despite repeated calls and emails to Chief of Police Jason Haberman and other officials responsible for legal oversight of the department.
I appealed to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records regarding my denied right-to-know requests. One appeal was granted, forcing the municipality to hand over data on overnight enforcement dating back five years. The data couldn’t conclusively prove selective enforcement, but confirmed a pattern of enforcement in streets zoned for uses other than single-family homes. I also sent a complaint to the Allegheny County District Attorney regarding lack of municipal investigation into police misconduct complaints against officers.
Through months of follow-up, I reflected on the irony that I didn’t even want a car in the first place. I did, however, want to know whether laws regarding cars were being enforced equally, or rather were being used as a source of regressive revenue targeting residents without driveways. The municipal budget records $2.3 million in projected 2026 revenue from parking fees, fines, licenses and permits alone.
Moreover, I wanted to feel like, when I made a complaint against my local police department, it would be taken seriously. I wanted an easy way to get clear and transparent data about police misconduct investigations — something Mt. Lebanon currently does not provide to the public. I dreamed of a world in which I wouldn’t be forced to communicate through the municipality’s attorney to learn the status of my concerns after my complaints had been ignored for almost a year.
‘The street is for celebration’
The street is not just a place where we park. In a larger sense, “the street” is a shared space. Thomas Merton, in his essay “The Street Is for Celebration” wrote:
“A city is what you do with space. A street is a space. … The quality of a city depends on whether these spaces are ‘inhabited’ or just ‘occupied.’ . . . An alienated space, an uninhabited space, is a space where you submit [emphasis original].”
How we interact with local government in the streets where we live matters. It determines whether we inhabit our communities or occupy them. Are streets a space for submission to fines and fees only paid by certain types of residents? Or, are they, instead, a place for modeling collaborative governance and transparency?
I’m for a future city of fewer cars and less parking. I’m for a future, too, where access to justice and transparency in governance and policing doesn’t have to be pursued with legal threats and right-to-know appeals. Mt. Lebanon residents, with legal training or otherwise, deserve transparency about what happens to public misconduct complaints against police officers unevenly enforcing the law.
For me today, stepping out on the street is not a moment of celebration. Every day I wake up wary of my car being targeted by the police. The price of living in Mt. Lebanon? Submission to unpredictable tickets, unaccountable police officers and uninvestigated public misconduct. When I live in a place where the police view every overnight parked vehicle as a potential “threat to residents,” I certainly don’t feel like “this is home” as the municipality brags. Instead I feel like a second-class citizen in a place where I’m unwelcome.
Dan Joyce is a third-year juris doctor student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and can be reached at d.joyce@pitt.edu.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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