Transcending Transgressions: A $30 Ticket And A Down Dog

I love Cambridge!

In an attempt to diffuse tension between the city's parking enforcement troops and its illegally-parked, expletive-hurling citizens, Cambridge authorities are now issuing tickets with yoga poses on the envelopes. The mentally balanced and relaxed silhouetted figures embossed on the new parking tickets are in various zen states: breathing, stretching, and engaged in a pose called: "The Citation Salutation."

The tickets were designed by Daniel Peltz, an assistant professor of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design, as part of the Cambridge artist-in-residence program. Mr. Peltz followed meter maids and car booters around town, and created a new ticket design aimed at melting away the seething mutual disgust between parking enforcers and violators.

"Getting parking tickets sometimes bothers me," Mr. Peltz writes in an email. "I started this process by wondering what would happen in a world where I received them with a set of graceful postures: a clean bend at the waist, a gentle lift of the windshield wiper and an attentive hand."

"He's trying to explore the giving and the receiving of parking tickets and what that really means," says Susan Clippinger, director of the department of traffic, parking and transportation for the City of Cambridge. "It's a very intense relationship, and often adversarial, but it doesn't have to be that way. The yoga on the envelopes is just a way to get people to step back from the frustration of getting a parking ticket and realize, this is just two individuals: one is doing their job and the other is getting a ticket because they parked illegally."