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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

That's error-prone (what if another blue chevy replaces it?), and takes 10 times as long as a simple mark, and doesn't work when the road is sandy or wet, and you need some quick way to erase the last marks, etc.

I can't think of anything nearly as quick and cheap and effective as a chalk mark on the tire.

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What about a notebook and pen? Note car number plate and/or description of car and location. If you've got somebody going wrong chalking tyres, you can have that person take notes instead.

(This might also take a bit longer than making a chalk mark, but time is not exactly of the essence here.)

I searched for "number plate" because I am pretty sure this is what is done in UK/Europe and I have no idea why you would consider doing anything else?

But nobody saying "license plate" is suggesting this - is there some reason why not?

Chalking seems 100% unreliable and very open to legal challenge.

I assume it's just harder to write down license plate "numbers" in the US since they are both less strictly formatted and less unique than any national plates in Europe (that I am aware of).

From a short search, it seems that license plate numbers aren't even unique across state borders in the US, for example.

In the UK equipment varies.

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

I find all of these solutions wonderfully low-tech. In Amsterdam, they slowly drive google streetview-style car which autotmatically records number plates, looks them up, and issues fines where necessary. The only thing needed is someone to drive the car, and I'm sure that's also going to replaced eventually.

I can think of a way.

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.

In urban areas the city could even work with local property owners to place video cameras that have enough angle to be able to have a constant view of all the cars that park. Could automate ticketing car owners who overstay.

*Not that I wish for this, but it's theoretically possible to implement.

incentivize this by passing 20% of the ticket price back to the property owner

How do we de-incentivize doing cop’s jobs for them on HN? This is a great idea with one problem: fuck the police.

Ban parking cars on public property. Then nobody needs to be tracking how long it's there for.

Fully agreed.

Palo Alto does something like this.

I know, but that's a little slower, way more expensive, and fails if the battery runs out or the GPS can't connect, or the license plate is too dirty to read.

Obviously the chalk method isn't perfect either, but it's close.

There are also a lot of advantages once you automate this via a camera. Now you can put cheap cameras near spots and/or mount the cameras on cars to automate ticketing as police are driving around on other business.

That is how parking enforcement works here in the Netherlands. Someone just drives a camera-equipped car around and everything happens automatically - you enter your license plate on the meter so times are known to the minute.

There are parking meters in the US city I live in, where you enter your license plate and you don't have to fill an individual meter or display a tag on your dash.

If the license plate is too dirty to read, give them a ticket for that instead.

Penalty should be greater than for the parking infraction anyway, otherwise people would dirty their plates deliberately.

I think Salt Lake City for one does enforce parking this way.

San Francisco already does. Hell, it might actually be built into the enforcement vehicle (the Interceptors!), but don’t quote me on that part.

My city does this (Florianopolis, Brazil). I can use a smart phone app to start the clock or just let an officer pass by and tag my car. Chalking seems very... rudimentary.

They're not exactly equivalent. Tire-chalking essentially proves that the vehicle didn't move (or that the driver was ridiculously unlucky in that the mark showed up at about the same location). The number/license plate merely shows that the same car is in the same parking spot, so the (legal, if arguably too "letter of the law") approach of vacating the space and parking there again is indistinguishable from overstaying the limit.

I believe most jurisdictions require you to leave a space for some time before the parking "resets"

How would they know that hadn't happened?

If you require vehicles to be gone from a certain street for 24 hours, say, before parking there again for a 2 hour spot, and you check it at 1 pm then later at 4 pm, you can conclude the vehicle wasn't gone for 24 hours.

Parking clocks solves the problem easily.

http://www.ericandleandra.com/2014/07/28/memory-monday-parki...

A photo

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