In a letter to editor, Robert R. Raywift argued that Parking should be prohibited from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. because he believed that the prohibit could avoid traffic jam and accident. However, the letter had some fallacious arguments so it was not as persuasive as it seemed to be.
The first fallacy that the author made was in the argument in the second paragraph. He argued that parking overnight is to have a garage in the street. Because it is illegal for anyone to have garage in the city street, overnight parking should be banned. This is a false analogy because parking in the street and having garage in the street are totally different cases. If one have a garage, there should have a shield like building with door, roof and wall. More importantly, nobody else can park in a private garage. So we can say that parking in the public street area temporarily for hours is totally case, since anyone can find room and park.
In the third and forth paragraphs, the author made a mistake of false cause. The author argued that if there is no parking on the side of the street, it would be easier to drive in the afternoon rush hour and morning. However, parking in the midnight absolutely is not the reason for the traffic jam in the day time. By prohibiting parking from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. one cannot solve any traffic problem in the morning or afternoon.
The author made a fallacy of poisoning the well in the first and sixth paragraphs. The author said all intelligent citizen should agree with him. However, the argument that if parking is prohibited from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., the traffic accident in this period will be eliminated he made in the sixth paragraph is unreasonable because he did not offer any data which can prove there is a high rate of accident caused by parking overnight. So we do not have to agree with him even if we are intelligent citizen.
Next, in the seventh paragraph, a fallacy of appeal to authority was made. The author quoted a experiment by a policeman to prove the prohibition of parking overnight can reduce the accident rate to zero.
But the experiment itself, as we can tell, is not scientific. Most of the people know that when we made an experiment, we must compare the results made with different ingredients. Although the author offered data that over four hundred accidents on the street happen during the past year, he did not told us how many of them happened during the midnight and were caused by the overnight parking.
Finally, there was a fallacy of personal attack in the eighth paragraph. The author claimed that the opponents of his suggestion, who said the present condition is safe enough, "don't know what 'safe' really means". The author said that the condition is not safe of there's even the slightest possible chance for an accident. Of course this is neither mental nor scientific. We cannot make sure there is no "slightest possible chance for accident" at all in any way and that why it is called accident; even when you are parking in your own garage you can hit the wall and make damage, but anyway you cannot say your garage is unsafe.
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