Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

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> I might suggest that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of oversight, and continues to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.

I'm having a hard time understanding how this isn't confirmation of exactly what I experienced and described. I'm sure there are lots of minor trivialities that might get filled out slightly wrong a decent percentage of the time, none of which have anything to do with the validity of the ticket. So if you know all the tiny trivial loopholes you have a decent chance of finding something done "wrong" for otherwise perfectly appropriate tickets.

So yeah, you're able to point out the tiniest unimportant mistakes on a parking citation and then take advantage of that flaw in the system to get people out of valid tickets. It's impressive I suppose, but not something I'd personally brag about.

That's not how laws work. You can't have one set of rules for one stakeholder, and another set of rules for another. Particularly when one of those stakeholders gets to acts as enforcement, judiciary AND beneficiary.

1 inch over the curb... we're going to tow your car with $700 worth of fines.

No visible sign on the street and nothing within 100 ft (which there has to be by law)... it doesn't matter, you should have known we intended that street to have no parking between 4-6pm.

If you tried to come up with a system with more adverse and broken incentives, you'd be hard pushed to come up with a better one than the SFMTA. 1) Let's saddle this organization with $10Ms of losses each year. 2) Let's give them the authority to issue tickets and fine the citizens for breaking an arbitrary set of laws. 3) Let's allow them keep the fines and treat it as 'revenue'. 4) Let's allows them to regulate themselves and decided if the tickets they issued are fair.

The "validity of the ticket" is determined by rules set forth by the city and the MTA. It also establishes the grounds for invalidity of a ticket. That's not taking advantage of the system, that's applying the system. The right way for the MTA to put Fixed out of business is to issue valid tickets that are held to a higher degree of scrutiny, otherwise the system just rots over time, as we see here.

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