And it's a pyrhic victory anyway, because chances are now the cars will get one of the metal tire boots put on, or get towed. Both of which are more expensive and a bigger hassle for everybody.
After a few months of no enforcement and letting the students get used to parking like this, then they'll crack down with brutal enforcement. I'm talking about them sniping you a few minutes after you walk away. Every year they'd reset and do the same thing over again to get some fresh meat.
Entrapment is the state coercing someone to do something they would not do under normal circumstances. It sounds to me as if these people are illegally parking under normal circumstances. The rules about curbs, hydrants, driveways, &c are well known and common enough between every state that there is no excuse that they weren't aware this was illegal.
It's still highly unethical, especially when your target population is supposedly already paying tens of thousands for use of the facilities.
City streets are not the campus facilities, and what of the people using public transit or other means of transportation? Should they have to pay additional on their tens of thousands to subsidize those people with cars?
They aren't the law either any more than Jimmy's Pizza place is when the call to tow a car that was abandoned for a week.
They made the parking rules unclear and never enforced them then cracked down brutally.
Most places do not make the rules unclear and many rules brought up in the subthread, e.g. hydrants and parking near an intersection, are well known and common among the states.
Look, I'm not saying that basically giving everyone a month with no warnings and then going out in force isn't a crappy thing to do. I'm just saying that that's not entrapment, nor is an an awful thing for the police to do, even if there are nicer ways to do it, e.g. giving notices on windshields for the first week of the semester and afterwards being issuing tickets.
The argument that it’s immoral to deal with people breaking the law because their used to getting away with it is absurd.
The sense of entitlement is absurd. If you park illegally you’ll get a fine, deal with it.
I went to a university that has no shortage of land to expand to. This meant that they have a couple of very large parking lots for on-campus students and some large commuter parking lots. If you didn't mind walking, parking was easy to come by. Those that complained about a 10 minute walk thought there was no parking. Funny thing was that it was easy to cross all of campus in less that 15 minutes. Really is a matter of perspective, I suppose.
I can understand this problem if you're serving a lot of nontraditional students who already have households, but not with 18-22 year old full time students.
There's also a community college that serves a lot of commuting students, and has none of its own housing.
The regional colleges have more commuter students, since you can save a boatload of money by living at home, but also probably don't have such severe parking problems -- land is cheaper.
That's the point. The university was crowing about how they deployed 40000 of these things already. They wouldn't be able to tow 40000 people as easily.
Me and my wife had to fight a ticket at one point for a spot we had paid for. No ryme or reason the lot was just grabbing revenue by literally stealing from customers with small tickets that they thought would not be challenged because
- you can have your license revoked for non payment of tickets
- you aren't entitled to a court hearing for a parking ticket so fighting it means figuring out how to handle it yourself or hiring an attorney to fight $30 tickets.
The best model for interactions in capitalism is predator prey wherein virtually no one is actually thinking of the system as a whole and sane conditions are only apparent as an emergent property of adversarial interactions.
In the UK parking at NHS hospitals is a lucrative revenue stream for parking companies - they toss the NHS a few pennies to justify it but it’s exploitation of those in an emotional state, such as visiting a very sick relative, or even picking up someone to take home. Any techniques developed to defeat those parasites is a public good.