Fallacies in The Letter---Wendi Fan

In his letter to editor, Robert R. Raywift states many reasons why parking in the street should be cancelled. However, he runs several logical fallacies in his letter, and this might puzzle the editor to understand his meaning.

First of all, the author says every wise citizen should support the idea that to forbid parking along the street for several reasons. This fallacy is poisoning the well because he makes an assertion that precludes an open discussion of the issue. The same wrong words also appear in Paragraph Six, he says that all of the wise citizens would please for the phenomena of few accidents. Not all citizen would agree with his opinion, and who would have this notion were not intelligent, were stupid. This expression is too arbitrary to consider carefully.

The second one is that in the second paragraph he describes that parking in the street as though putting individual garage in the street. This fallacy is false analogy because the author puts the parking position to compare with garage, they are totally different things. Since parking space is just to draw many lines in the street, and it can be changed easily. On the contrary, garage is made of some materials in a fixed place, it could not be moved in a normal way.

Furthermore, the author exemplifies his experience in the third paragraph, and states that it is really hard to park in the three main streets such as Lincoln Avenue, Marquand Avenue and West Main Street because of narrow room in the afternoon of traffic time. This is another fallacy of red herring. The author's plan is to prohibit parking from 2 am to 6 am, and his rough experience happened in the afternoon, so this is an irrelevant evidence.

Another fallacy is in Paragraph 5, the author says that parking overnight in the street is really bad and should be prohibited. This is begging the question, because the author just repeat his opinion rather than give the editor good reasons to support it.

Finally, the author runs a hasty generalization in the seventh paragraph. He lies an experiment of Burgess Jones who is the Chief of Police to prove that there can be reduced accidents significantly in Marquand Avenue from 2 am to 6 am by using signs to stop parking there for one day. After all, more than four hundred accidents happened in Marquand Avenue last year. This experiment cannot prove anything useful to have a stop parking sign just for one day because we don't know the real reasons of the four hundred accidents happened in Marquand Avenue, and we cannot be sure that which day and what time is more dangerous to park in this street. 

In conclusion, the author gives the editor several unconvinced reasons to state his opinion that parking in the main street from 2 am to 6 am should be prohibited to reduce traffic accidents.