Faulty LA hospital parking machine bills driver nearly $8k for a short visit
Published on Aug 06, 2025 at 10:14 AM (UTC+4)
by Claire Reid
Last updated on Aug 06, 2025 at 11:47 AM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Tom Wood
A woman was left horrified after she was hit with a bill for almost $8,000 by a parking machine at an LA hospital for less than an hour.
Cate Daniels visited the Glendale Memorial Hospital on Friday, July 25.
She parked up her car and spent around 45 minutes at the hospital.
But when she left, the parking machine issued her a bill for a staggering $7,829.
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The faulty hospital parking machine gave her an eye-popping bill
Parking your car can come with some unexpected complications.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Glenn Howerton once got his Tesla Model X stuck in a parking lot for days after the key fob failed to work, while this guy in Texas shared footage of a self-driving taxi getting trapped in an infinite loop while trying to exit a parking lot.
However, one part that should be straightforward is getting your bill, right?
You park up and then when it’s time to leave, you collect your bill at the machine and pay it. Simple.
Except that’s not quite how things worked out for Cate Daniels during a recent visit to Glendale Memorial Hospital in LA.
After spending just 45 minutes at the hospital, Cate made her way to the machine to pay what she owed, but the machine told her that her car had been at the lot for three years and calculated her bill to be $7,829.
She also claimed a parking attendant said her car had been parked ‘for three weeks’ at the lot.
Worse still, the bill automatically came out of Cate’s bank account, so she decided to go public with the mix up.
“How can, when people are receiving healthcare, something like this happen with any frequency?” she told CBS News.
“That is appalling. That’s my concern. That this is something that is systematic. I don’t hear any inclination to correct it.”
Parking Company of America, which operates the lot, said the charge should not have happened.
A spokesperson for the hospital apologized and blamed the incident on a glitch.
“We apologize for any inconvenience or concern this may have caused,” a spokesperson told the outlet.
Thankfully, after she appeared on TV, the hospital reached out to Cate, and she received a full refund.
She’s not the only motorist to get hit with an unexpected parking charge
While glitches like Cate experienced are thankfully rare, a driver over in Italy had his own unusual scenario, which saw him whacked with a hefty parking bill.
Mattia Bologna had parked his car legally in a free spot outside the Fano Sports Park before going away on vacation on July 7.
But when he returned to collect his car a week later, he discovered that the free parking spot had been changed into a paid one a couple of days earlier, and he had been hit with a fine.
Despite explaining the situation to officials, the cops were insistent and in the end he decided to just pay it.
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Claire Reid is a journalist who hails from the UK but is now living in New Zealand. She began her career after graduating with a degree in Journalism from Liverpool John Moore’s University and has more than a decade of experience, writing for both local newspapers and national news sites. Claire covers a wide variety of topics, with a special focus on cars, technology, planes, cryptocurrency, and luxury.
