Photo by Christina Monkeypants.

The District Department of Transportation fielded more than 175,000 complaints and service requests last year about broken parking meters, AAA Mid-Atlantic reported today in an outraged press release. This made up just over 82 percent of all service complaints the agency got during its last fiscal year. From a press release:

The Department received a total of 213,117 SRs [or service requests] in FY12, with the lion’s share, 175,537 SRs stemming from non-functioning parking meters. Yet that same year the District issued 1,884,367 parking tickets to motorists, or an average of 7.3 citations per minute, and it collected $92,554,646 in parking ticket revenue, calculates AAA Mid-Atlantic.

John B. Townsend II, AAA Mid-Atlantic’s manager of public and government affairs, said in a release that it’s not clear how many complaints were duplicates. “But that’s the likely explanation for the high-volume complaint level from chafed motorists,” Townsend said. “It proves that motorists have zero tolerance for a non-working parking meter after circling the block to find just one of the 17,000 highly coveted metered parking spaces.”

This is actually not new information, as DDOT released the info in a report from March. Townsend explained the timing of the release to DCist, saying that members had recently called to complain about broken parking meters in D.C. and that AAA recently found these numbers.

DCist’s request for comment from DDOT was not immediately returned. The agency told WTOP that “at any given time 99 percent of D.C.’s 17,000 meters are working.”