Parking Ticket Got You P.O.'d? Mass. City Tells Drivers to Relax with Yoga

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (CBS/AP) The Cambridge parking enforcement unit has a few helpful suggestions for how to deal with getting one of their tickets - try yoga!

"It's trying to debunk the idea that all parking tickets are a hostile action, because I don't think they are," Susan E. Clippinger, the city's transportation chief told the Boston Herald.

Newly featured on the back of Cambridge parking citations are instructions on how to bend into some simple stress-relieving yoga poses - after having received said ticket.

Not everyone is so laid back about it.

"I don't think it's working," Hyunho Noh, 29, of Cambridge told the Herald Monday, upon paying a $25 ticket featuring the "citation salutation"; that's a play on yoga's Sun Salutation. "I don't like it," said Noh.

The city, which is home to elite universities Harvard and MIT, printed 40,000 of the tickets as part of a public art project by artist-in-residence Daniel Peltz. Cambridge parking enforcement officers hand out about 340,000 tickets per year.

Among the other efforts in the parking project are new street signs explaining traffic rules in offbeat ways; "10,000 Excuses," a mural of excuses given by ticketed drivers; and plush, stuffed "soft-boots" to give the ultimate parking penalty a warmer, fuzzier feel.

But the kinder gentler movement apparently does not extend to nearby Somerville, Mass.

"I don't think we'd be having our parking attendants doing yoga poses," the city spokesman, Michael Meehan, told the Herald.

"We're not going to be switching over to a division of Tantra & Parking," Meehan quipped.