Photo by sciascia

Drivers hate parking tickets, but they’re all bound to get a few of them every year in D.C. But how much would it cost to, you know, pay your way out of just about every parking ticket for a year?

Today we have a hint. TBD reports that new car-sharing service car2go paid D.C. $578,000 to avoid parking tickets for a year. That’s part of the appeal of the service—the cars can be just about anywhere, and you can park them any place you choose (with restrictions on rush-hour and street-sweeping parking, though) without having to feed a meter or worry about residential parking time limits.

Since there are 200 cars in the D.C. fleet, the math is pretty simple—at the rate car2go paid, you could get out of most D.C. parking tickets for a year by paying $2,890 up front. Is it worth the peace of mind? Well, consider this—at the standard rate of $25 per parking ticket, you’d have to rack up 115 parking tickets in a year to break even.

From my many years of driving—sparingly—around D.C., I’m pretty sure I’ve never gotten close to half that amount in a single year. But I’m sure there are people who have. It’s doubtful that D.C. would ever consider making this policy, but the prospects of up-front cash could be mighty enticing in these leaner times.