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Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

> They racked up more than 471,000 parking violations last year...

I knew someone who owned a trucking company. They had a lawyer on retainer and every month or so they would gather all the parking tickets, go to a judge (or city official) and cut a deal to pay a fraction of the actual owed amount for all the tickets. This is because, if they did not comply, each ticket would be fought tooth and nail, and the city would be wrapped in legal red tape forever.

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This is common in NYC. The biggest violators should be paying the most, but instead, they pay the least per violation because they bargain down the fines.

Here's a pretty typical fine record for a truck that was illegally parked in the bike lane during my commute this week: https://twitter.com/CydeWeys/status/1188467550822293512 (expand all replies) And note how they're getting a reduction in fines: https://twitter.com/HowsMyDrivingNY/status/11884675886255882...

And Streetsblog has written an entire series of blog posts on it: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/category/issues-campaigns/stipul...

What are they supposed to do? There’s a difference between the letter of the law and reality.

You need deliveries and couriers to make a city work, and NYC is no different.

Advocate for dedicated commercial loading zones. They're not even doing that bare minimum.

But it's crucial to point out this simple fact, and I don't think you've quite internalized it yet: Parking illegally in safety infrastructure KILLS PEOPLE. Like, multiple people are dead every year in NYC solely because a vehicle was parked illegally. So regardless of anything else, they should not be doing that. If deliveries take longer, so be it. It's not acceptable to take other people's lives like this just to deliver some packages more quickly. The problem is as bad as it is because drivers break the law and aren't sufficiently punished for it; if they actually had to be compliant with the law, then we'd see how badly things are creaking and be forced to change things, by adding more safe loading zones.

> Parking illegally in safety infrastructure KILLS PEOPLE.

Parking illegally in safe infrastructure has the potential to kill people. But increase in parking violations doesn’t say anything about parking illegally in safety infrastructure. I’ve had my fair share of parking tickets throughout my life but those were things like parking somewhere where I didn’t have a permit (or dumber, I had a permit but the permit was partially blocked from sight) or parked somewhere for too long, and those weren’t safety related.

So, yeah, “they should not be doing that”, but the article doesn’t say “they’re doing that”. Do you have evidence that delivery trucks actually block say fire hydrants on a regular basis?

I bike the streets of NYC daily. I can tell you with absolute certainty* that delivery trucks frequently park in bike lanes (which this article talks about), which directly causes the deaths of several cyclists per year. You want their names? There's articles written every time a cyclist is run over, and often enough it's because someone was illegally parked in the bike lane and they were forced into a vehicle lane and then run down. As an interesting side note, emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks will use bike lanes when necessary to bypass vehicle congestion, but of course this doesn't work when the bike lane is blocked by an illegally parked vehicle. The cyclists who happen to be in the lane can of course simply pull their bikes up onto the sidewalk to let the emergency vehicle(s) through.

* Here's an example of 5 trucks parked in the bike lane in as many blocks from one of my morning commutes earlier this week: https://twitter.com/CydeWeys/status/1187386128288174080 This is not an extreme outlier; it's typical.

So we have half a million violations and complete disregard for the law, but you are saying they are not causing safety issues? You are the one that should be bringing in evidence to support this strange position. If we assume random chance, statistics aren't on your side.

And "potential to kill people" * "millions of people" = "dead people"

Problem is that only people or companies with deep pockets can violate the law that way. If you don’t have money for lawyers you have to pay the tickets.

That’s how end up with a two class society where some people are above the law.

Oh no, there are plenty of loopholes. It’s actually easier for a shady operator to operate than a legit one, deep pockets or not!

Parking tickets are tagged to a car, not the owner. So when you don’t pay in NY, your registration is suspended. Guess what? Bad operators don’t register in NY! (Rental/Lease fleets are registered in Arizona and Indiana, who are “business friendly” for this reason.)

Legit companies get a type of permit that can be suspended. But your shady contract delivery people flaunt these rules and disappear/reincorporate if they get caught.

That’s why the Amazons of the world are moving away from UPS/USPS/Fedex. The contract people are the bottom rung of society and agree (out of ignorance) to take on liability that an actual business would price into their rates. (This includes stuff like making sure the brakes work on the truck or that the driver is licensed, not just parking tickets)

Some truck companies make their employees pay for the truck lease. If workers can't finish enough deliveries then not only do they not get paid, they actually make a net loss. This means there is no lower bound for wages, if you exploit your workers diligently then you can get them to pay you for the privilege of working for you because they believe they will eventually receive ownership of the truck when the lease ends but they usually get fired before that happens.

This has implications for the automation debate. Robots require electricity and need to be manufactured in the first place. This means you can't actually "exploit" robots the same way you can exploit workers who receive government support or support from relatives.

Why doesn't NY just impound the cars that haven't paid?

I don't know what it's like in NY, but in my state you can take a driver safety course and cut your fees down considerably.

If taking such a driver safety course actually meant that people didn't park illegally, then it'd be a huge success, and would be well worth it. But the not parking illegally part itself would be by far the greatest reduction in fines.

That's for moving violations, not parking tickets.

For non-moving violations?

Deliver using bikes?

Or if it's large, send someone out on a bike, wait for a parking spot, bring in the truck.

Reserve spaces for delivery trucks, set up a system so they don't arrive at the same time.

These are all options that the city can encourage/legislate/enforce.

After repeat offense: impound the vehicle.

In this example, they paid about 72% of the full fine -- more than I expected. ($59.5k paid, $22.7k reduced)

I was expecting "a fraction" to be 10% or 20%.

This is crazy, in 3 days they got 46 fines!

How much is a parking fine though in NYC? His average is 69.44$. I'm Canadian and my last parking ticket was 63$ CAD (47.71$ USD).

This is a great argument for making the fines increase for repeat offenders. Nothing for, say, the first 5 fines, but after that increase them by 30% for each additional fine.

Or, the city could have the police put a boot on the truck tires.

It seems boots are reserved for poor people. I've only ever seen boots on run down cars in working class neighborhoods like Crown Heights or Bed Stuy.

I've seen a boot on a Lamborghini somewhere in my neighborhood. It was one of the very few cases I ever saw a Lamborghini around; most cars in my neighborhood are way less expensive.

Boots are for cars which are not worth towing. Really cheap cars are unlikely to make any money if you bring it to a towyard. A Lambo, if damaged, would cost more in incidental repair than you would get out of the owner.

wow, a legal DOS.

The same happens with pharmaceutical, financial or probably all companies and people with enough money . Often it’s very expensive to prosecute them so they get let off the hook or pay a settlement. That’s how we end up with a two class society where some participants are above the law because they have money for lawyers.

I guess that kind of shit doesn't fly in authoritarian countries where the corporations fear the government instead of the other way around, as shown by all the recent China appeasement.

People could use it too if they'd just fight every traffic ticket.

There are/were some startups in this space: DoNotPay, WinIt, Off the Record, TurboAppeal. Not sure how they're doing.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/5/17119956/parking-ticket-propert...

This story about a delivery company that thought they were negotiating their parking tickets is hilarious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/nyregion/price-of-a-parki...

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