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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

If you were a delivery driver you would consider parking tickets a cost of doing business too.

It's as if legal parking costs $20, the parking ticket is $5. However you may not even get the parking ticket, so obviously you would never pay for parking.

This was the situation for bicycle parking in Japan.

~$5 a day to park my bike legally.

~$25 ticket if my bike got confiscated for being parked illegally.

It got confiscated twice in 3 years. Needless to say, basically everyone parked illegally.

When I was a kid, Brussels public transport was purely proactive payment. Hop on a bus/tram/subway, scan your card. I didn't ride enough for it to matter, and it was cheap (1 euro per trip), so I didn't game the system but many of my friends just decided it was either going to cost them $500/yr in fines or it would cost them $500/yr in tickets, so they just rode without a ticket.

The difference is it is quite likely that the parking ticket cost is higher than the profit, even revenue you made while parked there. So there is a real incentive to at least try and avoid them.

Consider the case if a parking ticket was 5c - why would (absent other disincentives) delivery drivers ever obey parking signage?

This is a bit old but AFAIK still in place. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14602712/ns/business-us_business/t...

"Under the program, the type of violation determines the ticket’s outcome. For example, double-parking in some parts of the city is a violation that can be erased completely for commercial vehicles. Violations for blocking a crosswalk or a bike lane can only be reduced by about 15 percent. Fines for blocking a driveway can be knocked down by 75 percent. To date, 312 companies are enrolled in the program, including heavyweights like UPS, FedEx, Verizon, Coca-Cola and Time Warner Cable, which are the city’s biggest commercial offenders."

crazy

That's pretty much how it works with delivery services and ride shares where I live. Tickets are of course discounted by the chance of actually getting one during the time you are in violation, which seems to be small. They are close to useless as a disincentive.

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