Did You Know? Denver Tows and Moves Cars During Street-Sweeping Season — for Free!

It was the first week of street sweeping in Denver, and Fulton had driven in from out of town to visit his pal. Being on a road trip, nearly all of his stuff was still inside his car, meaning a tow could be devastating. In a panic, he rushed out the door.

Although Fulton was technically parked in a street-sweeping zone in the 600 block of 12th Avenue, he says that the only street-sweeping signs he saw were placed down the street — on the other side of an alleyway. With that alley separating his parking spot from the “No Parking 1ST FRIDAY APR THRU NOV” signs, the out-of-state visitor figured he was in the clear.

As evidenced by the tow trucks, Fulton was not in the clear.

Determined to get in and drive off, the young man quickly darted over to his Outback but was spotted by one of the truck drivers, who came over and questioned him about his license plate number.

“For the ticket?” Fulton asked.

“No, I’m going to mark it down as a tow,” the driver responded.

To Fulton, what could have been a bothersome $120 fine and ill-fated impound situation actually ended up being a small blessing in disguise — with Denver’s Department of Transportation & Infrastructure telling Westword that the city was towing and moving cars that day so it could “effectively sweep.”

But there’s a catch:

“We move the cars to a spot nearby and then move the cars back,” says spokesperson Nancy Kuhn.

It’s a scene straight out of Dude, Where’s My Car? — with residents often coming outside and finding their vehicles in completely different spots than where they left them.

“Once a year, we post additional No Parking signs in an area generally bounded by 11th Avenue to Colfax and Logan to Ogden, and move cars that remain parked on the street,” Kuhn explains. “It is an area of town that is very heavily parked and difficult to sweep to the extent we like to throughout the sweeping season, so we make this extra effort in this specific area of town once a year to get a clean sweep.”

According to the community-based parking app SpotAngels, Denver is one of the few municipalities in the U.S. that doesn’t automatically impound towed vehicles. The city is instead known to relocate cars to nearby locations where they can legally sit, the site says.

“If your vehicle’s been towed, contact the Denver Police Non-Emergency line to locate it: 720-913-2000,” says SpotAngels. “When you get the recorded message, hit 0 for the operator; they will look up your vehicle’s location.”

While SpotAngels claims the city charges $100 to relocate a person’s car, Kuhn tells Westword that they were moving vehicles free of charge last week. But they still gave out $50 street-sweeping citations.

“What was happening in that location last week is a very specific effort that has happened for probably close to twenty years now, and which started at the request of the community,” Kuhn says. “For this effort, we issued $50 street-sweeping citations to cars that remained parked on the street; no additional fine [for the tow].”

In contrast, it would cost a vehicle owner $120 (and $20 per day for storage) to retrieve their impounded car, according to the sheriff’s department.

Coloradans have had a rocky history with tow truck companies in the past. Wyatt’s Towing (which has a 1.5-star rating on Google) and other tow companies throughout the state have been called out for predatory schemes involving taking advantage of formerly loose protections for vehicle owners to make money, according to a blog post from the Community Economic Defense Project.

The 2022 blog post says that a towed vehicle could often result in over $600 in fines for the vehicle’s owner.

Issues with towing got so bad that the state passed House Bill 22-1314 in August last year. Among other protections, it requires companies to provide 24 hours’ notice to a vehicle owner before a tow and allows owners to recover their vehicle without payment (as long as they sign a form acknowledging their debt to the tow company).

As for the towing activity in Capitol Hill last week, Kuhn says: “I think the effort is designed in a way that serves the neighborhood well. We’re making a concerted effort to clean the streets in a particular area where on-street parking is heavily utilized while remaining customer-friendly.”