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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

That’s what happens in my area. Signs go up a week or so in advance saying you’ll be towed if parked there past date X.

The "posted signs" thing is an unimpressive solution in 2022 imho and they should really email you or text you "hey move your car please" etc.

As a thought experiment, imagine that the city government was motivated to find a car's owner for some reason, perhaps as a suspect or witness of a serious crime etc. Meaning if they have your plate number and think you're a murderer, they will definitely find you and communicate with you (the message that they communicate will be "come to the police station").

I claim this is a proof by construction that they could communicate with you by some method other than posted signs, if they actually wanted to. And they just choose to do the laziest possible "post signs" solution because of basically incompetence/laziness, not because there's no other way for them to identify and communicate with a car's owner.

In my city at least the weekly street cleaning requires you to move your car weekly. So signs posted a week ahead are typically not as bad. Though the police did once us my apartment buzzer to tell me to move my car, it didn’t always happen (I’ve been towed twice in my 2 decades in the city)..

Also when they tow you it’s to a lot, they don’t just dump you on some other street like in Philly.

That said, it still seems helpful to know immediately as you're getting the space what the timeframe is for leaving. If the're going to start clearing the street in an hour, I'll probably park elsewhere right off the bat and not wait for an email.

How is the city supposed to know my cell phone number or email? I don't generally give them out. I give out my landline whenever I have to give out a phone number. And heck, there are plenty of people in a big city like Philly that don't have a cell phone, too. (And yes, some of them have cars, believe it or not.) Plus cell phones break, emails get sent to spam, etc. Putting a sign up at the place where you are likely to do the illegal thing seems pretty sensible to me.

> How is the city supposed to know my cell phone number or email?

My email's on file with the DMV; I get emails when my plates are due for renewal. Local law enforcement likely has access to that database.

And even if they don’t, the DMV could set up an API for local parking authorities that’s basically “send an email to the owner of this license plate”.

Well, they have owner of car and presumably where they live, they could send a snail mail at the very least

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