Photo by Matt.Dunn

Forget about the commute — it’s the parking that’ll do you in.

Although the District will formally lift the snow emergency and all its attendant parking restrictions today at 5 p.m., it will come as cold comfort to the drivers who’ve learned a $250 lesson about where not to park when it snows. The District Department of Public Works doesn’t list the hefty snowmergency parking fine among its top 20 parking violations and fees list — which itself is the number-one worst top-20 list ever — but I bet some drivers would put it near the top.

Yet it’s hardly the snow emergency routes that are giving drivers the most grief. Just last night, DCist head honcho Sommer Mathis tweeted that people who decided to park in lanes of traffic were receiving tickets. But now that the curbside lanes are covered over in large drifts of snow, the driving lanes are the new curbside lanes. Many streets in the District have been reduced from four or two lanes down to two or even one lane. (Hence my roommate’s crushing three-and-a-half hour drive home from Northern Virginia last night.)

It is arguably dumb for drivers to park along snow emergency routes, and it’s certainly risky to park in the new nontraditional parking lanes. What are people supposed to do? The efforts to shovel sidewalks and clear out cars have absorbed a great deal of the available parking, leaving huge mounds of snow that restrict drivers’ visibility as well as parking pockets that are difficult to back into. How can parking enforcers even pretend that these conditions represent anything normal or enforceable?