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Comment by rrdharan | Hacker News Reader

An Audi RS6 used to park regularly in the commercial loading area right outside my old apartment in Gramercy (17th and Irving).

It never got ticketed because it had “volunteer ambulance service” license plates. Which apparently are a thing you can buy with a large enough donation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1fojz9/can_people_with...

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Funny that no-one in that thread mentions the actual problem with someone parking in front of a hydrant (increases risk that they die in a fire due to fire department being unable to quickly access it).

The fire department will usually just break your windows and run the hose through the car. From what I understand it doesn't actually slow them down by much (I'm obviously not condoning this activity). If it's an expensive car they'll make sure that the hose leaks. A lot.

Plenty of examples if you search for "fire hose through car"

Usually firefighters just run the hose through the car.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/10/boston-firefigh...

That's amazing.

That's another problem that doesn't need to exist. I never saw a fire hydrant until I arrived in the states, because the smart thing to do is put it under a hatch somewhere in the road.

How is it better when you can accidentally park on top of it? Sounds worse. Harder to access, access can be cut off by single car. A hydrant has 4 directions of flow, so works fine. I think we have the engineering well sorted.

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