I suppose I'm happy that the fourth amendment was upheld, but from a privacy perspective I'm disheartened.
A chalked tire was ephemeral. I doubt that whatever replaces it will be.
A chalked tire was ephemeral. I doubt that whatever replaces it will be.
My girlfriend tells me of a homeless guy that used to roam the streets of Bondi, Australia – as in the famous beach – rubbing the chalk off the tyres. This guy never said a word, just shuffled about rubbing off chalk. Suffice to say he was a local hero.
Now he’s gonna have to learn how to DROP TABLE.
This ruling applies to the US, not Australia.
Regardless, it's story a friend of a friend told somebody, who knows how true
I don't go around ranting about inequality much in general; I'm just bemused by the implication that increasing it is obviously good karma.
I thought it was amusing, but I didn't park on the street.
Hmm...a _closed_ system sort of implies there are no external actors doesn't it?
Your statement appears superficially dispassionate and hypothetical, but I don't think it makes any sense unless it is unpacked as a lot of normative statements that would be very controversial if explicitly stated.
Everything depends on how you frame it. When making decisions, you can maximize utility for just yourself, or perhaps for friends and family, or maybe for everyone in your small town. How you choose to frame who you care about will determine the decisions you make. If you include "the government" in this frame of reference, there is no overall change in net utility when a ticket is given. Someone pays a large sum of money (negative utility) and it goes into government coffers (positive utility).
People who put change in meters likely do not include "the government" in their system of utility. In that frame of reference, a ticket being written is a net decrease in utility because the positive utility of government revenue doesn't matter.
My point is, actions that seem irrational to you may actually be understood as rational when viewed from a different frame of reference.
I think I get what you are saying...for instance, arresting a serial killer would be a net decrease in utility, because the positive utility enjoyed by government workers being paid to prosecute, etc. doesn't matter when you don't consider the government as part of your logical system.
Are you sure you are using an orthodox style of reasoning?
I'm not using orthodox reasoning. I'm just explaining a perspective you don't seem to understand. And you don't have to agree with it to understand.
I suspect you are right and share your foreboding...
However, a very easy solution would be to just mark the asphalt around the tires ... maybe write "blue chevy" between the marks.
So easy.
Instead, a politically connected services firm will capture local mayors / council members (very, very cheaply - shockingly cheaply) and build it into their unnecessary speed/redlight camera systems.
I can't think of anything nearly as quick and cheap and effective as a chalk mark on the tire.
Police could walk around with a hand held license plate scanner, that electronically tracks the general location of the parking space, and the car.
I bet this could be done with a phone app, actually.
*Not that I wish for this, but it's theoretically possible to implement.
Obviously the chalk method isn't perfect either, but it's close.
Penalty should be greater than for the parking infraction anyway, otherwise people would dirty their plates deliberately.
(This might also take a bit longer than making a chalk mark, but time is not exactly of the essence here.)
But nobody saying "license plate" is suggesting this - is there some reason why not?
Chalking seems 100% unreliable and very open to legal challenge.
From a short search, it seems that license plate numbers aren't even unique across state borders in the US, for example.
I've seen smartphone based license scanners, Psion-based data entry terminals (they punch in each and every offenders license plate), but parking meters tend to have a paper receipt you place on the dashboard or stick to the window. But now they have a pay-using-an-app option ... They take your licence plate details always and check it against an online db, and if not then they look for a paper ticket.
Pretty much, if you park in a time limited street zone or a metered zone or a municipal car park ... You can be assured your car number plate is captured along with entry and exit times.
The data is likely sold on too
http://www.ericandleandra.com/2014/07/28/memory-monday-parki...
I agree that there’s a history of questionable business practices in that industry but those systems are far from unnecessary. Motor vehicles being driven irresponsibly kill something like 40k Americans per year and cause all sorts of injuries and quality of life reductions. Cameras are a good way to discourage that without using tons of police time or dragging in questions of fairness — the call should be punishing corruption, not giving up a valuable tool.
Right on red is awesome as a driver, but it makes roads really dangerous for other road users. I think bad intersection design is partly to blame for perceived "frivolous" red light tickets, but at the same time I think that drivers really should come to a complete stop before the line (and before the crosswalk if there is one) before deciding if a right turn on red is safe or practicable. If people can't even be bothered to stop for a right turn on red then it's probably better to ban them outright.
Also, I've seen enough people run red lights 2-3 seconds after the light changes that I want red light cameras at every intersection anyways. It might be 1 in every 250 people who gets dinged for the right turn on red ticket, but that's stupidly dangerous.
If a fix is needed, increase the fine for blowing the light, scale it based on the time the light had been red (so you don't excessively punish people who got caught in the zone of indecision), and reduce the fine for rolling through a right on red.
If you don't look both ways, why not?
You are walking up to an intersection and the crosswalk sign is green. You look right and across the intersection all the traffic is stopped. You look left and there is a car coming, but it is clearly slowing down for the red light. You step into the intersection, but the car doesn't actually stop. They turn right at the intersection. You have to jump away. The problem here is not that you didn't look, but that you misinterpreted what the car was doing. It would be best to wait until all approaching cars are actually stopped before entering the intersection, but next time you are crossing a street I challenge you to see if you always do that. It's surprisingly uncommon because the car is "obviously" stopping.
The second is more of a clear cut problem. Bicycles often travel at speeds much faster than people expect. It's not unusual for a road bike to be going over 30 km/h (just under 20 mph). Cars should wait for you to clear the intersection, but often they aren't looking for bikes and will make a right hand turn, cutting off the cyclist. It happened to me many times in Canada. I'm very happy that the turn-on-red rule is not allowed in Japan where I live now.
This is why bike lane stripes have a dotted section when approaching an intersection, to give drivers a hint about what they are supposed to do. Unfortunately, only a minority of drivers understand and follow the hint.
You meant to say “real tickets”, right, since you described someone actually breaking the law — and I've seen many, many times where “no other traffic” meant “no other traffic which the driver saw, correctly understood, and respected”. I've had a few close calls in crosswalks and there's nothing fake about it.
Perhaps the US government or the states should enact data retention laws to ensure stuff gets purged in order to avoid the downsides of a surveillance state.
The main purpose of street front parking meters, aside from revenue, is to encourage people to get in and get out. Parking is a limited resource designed to support local businesses, whose revenue scales with the number of visits, not their duration.
We’ve had mechanically metered parking since the 1940s, and manually paid for parking before that. Something has to pay for all that concrete.
Public spending tries to account for quality all the time. Quality "metrics" of various sorts exist in lots of places and can always be evaluated (or found, then evaluated, as may often need to be the case) when making trade-offs.
In the case of public parking, there are ways to improve "quality" by reducing overall parking pressure at specific locations by "moving" it to other areas, such as park-and-ride combinations with public transportation, improving access to site-to-site ground transportation (bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, segways, what have you), and just improved public transportation in general.
Quantity is often an easier metric to optimize for because it's always a number, but that's all the more reason for public spending to find ways to do the hard thing and optimize for quality. That's why we elect people to work on hard problems and care so much about public spending.
I don't see how that is a terrible way to make concrete decisions about public spending, and I'm very not sure why you are arguing that it is. Quality can certainly be defined and optimized for, and that's precisely what I've said, and provided specific examples for. I even admitted that optimizing for quality is hard, but just because something is hard doesn't make it impossible to make concrete decisions about.
Arguably this is exactly part of why retail disappeared from many urban environments because suburban and exurban Malls were better at optimizing for lingering, social experiences in the 70s/80s.
That's not a purpose aside from revenue, that's a mechanism for increasing sales, property, and/or income tax revenue, depending on the particular tax regime in the locality.
You can downvote all you want, but it's been researched.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/12/cyclists-and-...
https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/study-shows-people-w...
https://www.bishopstonsociety.org.uk/bishopston/amenities/11...
Hmm...sounds like a good justification for owning a car - I can't give it up, otherwise I would spend too much on other stuff!
But in the case of Palo Alto, this isn't true. Parking is just hard enough to find that people generally do walk once parked. And there aren't enough people in downtown to keep it alive without the outsiders.
And so the "just millionaires" become the new downtrodden and homeless. At least, in their own minds.
You wanna talk about "Reality Distortion Effect"?
Palo Alto is oddly not one of them. I don't know why PA is so unusual, but it is. Might be the safety. Might be the disposable income. Might be the lack of mainstream-style shopping and dining areas.
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
>“Park or parking” shall mean the standing of a vehicle, whether occupied or not, otherwise than temporarily for the purpose of and while actually engaged in loading or unloading merchandise or passengers.
As long as you're physically engaged in loading or unloading merchandise or passengers, your car is standing but not parking. If you only need to drop off your child and don't need to escort her inside, you shouldn't be forced to pay for parking.
This is weird to me. Is parking time a per day thing instead of per instance - e.g. if I park for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, would it violate a 3-hour parking space? If not, what's the criteria for being "not parked", if getting in and driving your vehicle to another spot isn't it - would around the block count?
In many cities, it's a certain time limit in a certain geographic zone within a particular time window (e.g., 1 hour in a 2 hour window in a set of adhat blocks) that either hits a hard limit or (where tiered pricing is used) a higher price/time tier.
Without the physical intrusion, I don't think this ruling would apply at all.
The typical method along those lines is paying at a machine, getting a receipt, and posting the receipt visibly inside the windshield or the street side window, but, yes. This was about physical trespass for information without sufficient cause, not a right not to have parking time tracked.
My experience though is this particular style of parking pass is usually on private property where the people checking are not part of a branch of police though, and thus I think are not bound against unreasonable search in the same way?
For example, I saw an article a few years ago where a cop was literally walking a drug dog around a house. The dog detected drugs so they busted the door down. The courts threw the case out, there was no reason for a drug dog to be searching around his house.
I’d expect if you had a drugs or a dead body in plain view of a window then your expectation of privacy is gone.
No, by the plain view doctrine information gathered at least by normal human senses without a physical trespass is not a search.
> Like, a police officer dragging a street by looking in every window for pot or guns would presumably be indiscriminately searching without probably cause
No, they wouldn't, just like a police officer indiscriminately looking through your car window for violations of cellphone use while driving laws without any particular cause isn't.
In another sense, no, because what the chalk does is establish that this car has not moved since the last time the officer went by. If you chalk the tire yourself, the officer cannot know when you did so.
* Like the GPS trackers, license plates are devices designed to aid in identifying and locating a vehicle from a distance by technological means.
* Like the chalk marks, the government is using these devices indiscriminately, without probable cause.
* For bonus points, license plates are compelled speech, like requiring you to introduce yourself with your real name to everyone you meet.
It’S certainly not a guaranteed win, but it’s not so far fetched that I’d be surprised to see a competent lawyer try it.
Being required to wear a real-name badge in a public place is much more unsettling.
If your unregistered car is not in disrepair and you aren't storing multiple cars in your front yard, you're very unlikely to be cited.
I just looked up my town ordinance and it only applies to "junk motor vehicles."
And just exactly who determines this "junk" status?
Snark aside, law isn't code and the "reasonable person" test works well in most cases.
The way most places I'm aware of structure it is vehicles that don't have current registration or that can't move under their own power. That's potentially more broad than "junk" but also a more objective standard.
This sort of law can have a severe impact on poor people. Imagine you're barely getting by, then your car breaks down. This is not unlikely because as you're barely getting by, you have an older car and you're not having it maintained professionally on a rigorous schedule. It's going to be a while before you can afford the parts - let's say a "new" transmission from a junkyard. It sure would help if you didn't have to pay $100/month to keep insurance on it though. Of course, that means you have to turn in the license plate, or they'll suspend your driver's license (in certain jurisdictions).
A lot of people have to sell their car for scrap in this situation, which does not give them anywhere near enough to replace it with something reliable.
Given it's impact on day to day life, perhaps it is time to change that.
That's why I won't get a amateur radio plate any more. Anybody can look up my callsign and figure out who I am. And I'm legally required to show it.
At least a license plate has some obfuscation between plate# and human who registered it.
License plates originated in the early 1900s, long before color film cameras were a thing, and more than a century before inexpensive, at-scale license plate readers were a thing.
License plates were devices designed to aid police officers in identifying a vehicle from up close by requesting a license plate check.
It was remarkable in 2002's Bourne Identity when the highly-trained agent remarked that he knew the license plate numbers of every vehicle in the lot, and the implication that he'd recall them if they happened across the same cars again was scary.
The fact that it costs almost nothing to outfit every meter reader with a license plate scanner and log the motion of people and cars in a central database is an accident caused by the progress of technology, not a design goal of the license plate.
Preventing abuse of technologies as they become possible is a hard problem.
It certainly wasn’t a design goal for 1910-era license plates, but it probably is for 2010-era license plates. The only way to really know would be to subpoena the records relating to the most recent redesign process.
There are companies that want to turn your cell phone into that transponder so that you can just use your phone as a universal transponder.
This seems likely to happen. Once it does, will having a smart phone with this feature enabled be required to drive on a road? If so, it is seems likely that this requirement will be challenged in court, but what's the difference between being required to have a plate on your car or an app on your phone?
That, and "conspiracy theorist", are propaganda terms, and should be rejected.
...wow.
Straw manning does not make your position look stronger. Privacy is a valid concern.
Note, in particular, "Don't be snarky" and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Also the one against calling names (such as "tinfoil hat wearers").
I like the idea of reverse regulations. Like I shouldn’t have to display my license plate unless I’ve been cited as a dangerous driver.
Actual police work.
Does that also mean that petrol is now free since you could just fill up and drive away without ever being recognized? Or are we also putting someone at each pump to make sure nobody drives away?
This would also make actual police investigation harder. How would you call the police on someone driving recklessly without being able to provide the plate? What about when they need to find someone that has a done a crime? Should they close down traffic and search every single cars of the same color and make as the criminal's?
The only way removing plates would work is if you replace it with something more invasive (i.e. facial recognition).
In short, you could do any crimes you currently do with a stolen car or fake plates without any effort.
Anyway, pre-paying for gas is a thing that's pretty straightforward, is my main point.
Nitpick, but last I checked, New Jersey still doesn't let you pump your own gas.
No I advocate not taking you seriously from now on.
>No
>The government is in it rights to very specifically limit what people[...] can do with license plate data.
Ok, thanks for retracting your previous position, for a second there you were advocating for people to be imprisoned for things they do with their mind.
All of the mobile "Your speed is" trailers also have ALPR. You can leave your phone at home, but law enforcement still knows where you're at.
I think this is quite common now in the US?
Googling, I'm not sure if it's not quite common yet (yet!), or there just hasn't been a lot of attention to it?
https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/License-Plate-Scanning...
https://ops-com.com/parking-security-platform/license-plate-...
https://www.genetec.com/solutions/industries/parking-enforce...
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7186110-181/crimebeat-wha...
Otherwise no one can place parking tickets no more.
soon enough (realistically 15-20 years) license plates may still be around but no one is going to use them. the car is going to identify itself electronically. and i am a huge personal freedoms and privacy supporter but i am all for this.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/06/01/616043976...
Ahh of course. Heaven forbid anyone ever not be looking at an ad.
Not that huge