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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

While placebo "walk" buttons in New York City are amusing, more malevolent was that NYC had thousands of placebo fire hydrants. The city would ticket people who parked in front of these unused fire hydrants even though they had been disconnected decades earlier.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/nyregion/soapbox-a-little-...

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There was a similar controversy with NYPD issuing parking tickets illegally for parking in front of sidewalk pedestrian ramps that are not at crosswalks. The most ticketed one collected $48,000 in parking tickets over 2.5 years despite actually being a legal spot.

http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-sy...

Maybe I'm alone, but I feel like this makes sense. It would be difficult, and take more effort than its worth, to have to decide which hydrants are legal to park in front of, somehow designate them so drivers know they're inactive when looking for parking spots, and instruct police and parking enforcers on which hydrants they're allowed to ticket for.

Putting a cover over the hydrant? Like they do with out of order parking meters.

You could paint inactive hydrants a different colour. Cheap and easy to do.

I guess that's open to abuse with people painting active hydrants to make them appear inactive and open up more parking spaces.

Only issue with this is probably the city would have to hire somebody to paint it, so they have to decide on a budget, have a bidding process, comply with union requirements, and then finally execute it.

The covering of them mentioned by nommm-nommm might actually work, though.

Maybe remove or fix the non-functional hydrants? It seems to me that firefighters wasting time trying to use one in an emergency could have far more serious consequences than just some parking tickets.

The article clearly explains why this was not considered before, and I presume firefighters are well aware of which hydrants are functional.

The Fire Department already has to keep track of which hydrants are operational.

If marking them would generate any revenue it would be done very quickly. As it is not marking them generates tons of parking ticket revenue, so that's what's done.

That's pretty much exactly what I said, except with a half-baked political opinion weaved in.

Or they could do like the do in the UK, and have the hydrants in manholes in the middle of the road or pavement, so they can't be blocked by cars and won't freeze or get damaged. The fire engines carry the above ground hydrant part with them and attach them when they use them. But then that wouldn't generate any revenue.

https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-the-UK-have-fire-hydrants

Postscript: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/09/nyregion/dormant-fire-hydr...

I don't think this is necessarily malevolent.

If you don't enforce the parking law for the non-functioning hydrants, people may become complacent or confused and start parking in front of necessary ones.

But removing them isn't worth it either, because it's expensive, and there's no particular need to. (The article says they can afford it, but even so, there are probably better uses for the money.)

>there's no particular need to

How about creating legal parking places? Obviously some of those parking places were heavily desired.

So it needs to be clear which ones are non-functioning so people know it's ok to park there. Ignoring that, and profiting off of it is malevolent.

Making it clear (say, by painting them) would still cost money.

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