You think it's gonna help?
That would be the defintion of "socializing costs" while "privatising revenues".
> Unlike other meter maids, who issue parking tickets to motorists when they overstay, Gold Coast meter maids put money into parking meters which might otherwise expire, preventing vehicle owners from incurring a fine. After the introduction of pay-and-display parking meters they took on the task of explaining to motorists how the machines work.
Say what now??
> The Surfers Paradise meter maids were first instituted by entrepreneur Bernie Elsey in 1965, through the Surfers Paradise Progress Association, which was opposed to the introduction of parking meters by the Gold Coast City Council.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfers_Paradise_Meter_Maids
Chicago.
"Chicago's Parking Meter Deal a Lesson in 'Worst Practices" - https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a...
] In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council agreed to lease Chicago’s parking meter business for 75 years and in return received $1.15 billion from Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a venture that includes Wall Street investment house Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
It also mentions:
] Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are rethinking their parking meter deals because of Chicago’s difficulties, according to Bloomberg Business News. Unlike
This is over ten years old. I wonder what those cities wound up doing.
A sure sign of corruption. An honest lease would be short, so that it can simply not be renewed if problems arise.
is an approximately equally sure sign of corruption.
So abuse in the system is rampant by parking enforcement. Everyone I know who drives in the city has crazy stories of bullshit tickets or tows.
Chicago is also the city that got caught shortening yellow light duration after installing traffic cameras which wrote automated tickets.
If you have a minimum wage job you likely don’t have the time flexibility to allow you to go to any kind of “court” to contest a fine. If you have a high paying job, then likely the time costs you more than what you save - especially if the cost of contesting a fine in capped at something “affordable”.
Your other question: what is “acceptable service level” measuring for a ticketing service?
To come up with an actual service level agreement would require some knowledge of what outcomes are desired and some thought about how those numbers could be gamed, but I don't see why this is not possible. Private companies contract out work all the time and don't seem helpless in their ability to get what they want from it. Why should the government not be able to do this?
A city obviously has _some_ incentive to get more money from tickets (in the US see things like ticket revenue requirements, "civil forfeiture"/theft, distributing the received assets to the orgs issuing the tickets, stealing property, etc). But the city also has actual non-revenue reasons as well - for example I have received multiple parking tickets around my house over the last few years because there are parking restrictions to allow street cleaning, etc (the problem isn't the signage, it's the forgetting about the restrictions, and them being "2nd and 4th Tuesday" on one side of the street and "1st and 3rd Tuesday" on the other).
Similarly traffic tickets say are intended to make roads safer by discouraging speeding, etc (although they functionally just mean speeding is allowed if you are rich).
Using speeding tickets as an example, it is in the interests of an organization that receives revenue from tickets that people do speed. On the other side various governments have a real interest in not having crashes, etc as that has impact on the economy, it impacts voters, etc. But even this depends on the people enforcing traffic laws not being corrupt - and gov agencies getting any funding from tickets creates an obvious moral hazard. In California at least you get the CHP getting significant funding from ticket/fine revenue, and as a result of this the CHP does not maintain visibility while speed checking, but instead hides. The former results in people not speeding, the latter means that they get to issue tickets.
An illogical extreme of this would be to set the speed limit for a freeway below the design speed for said freeway - this is a particularly subtle one: most research shows that people will tend towards driving at the designed speed of a roadway, so you can create an environment where the default behavior is "breaking the law" giving you a limitless source of income. Honestly, it's why things like speeding tickets, etc should be required to have all fines sent to a separate account (say victim support or something) where the relevant agencies can't use the income directly or indirectly.
This is why the incredibly hated traffic cameras are infinitely superior to manual speed checking - fixed cameras in locations where speeding is dangerous are, well, fixed. This means that even if people do speed, they learn to avoid speeding in places it's particularly dangerous, if only to avoid guaranteed tickets.
As an example, a friend of mine was engaged to a fellow who worked as a mailman in New York. His mail route took him 2 hours to complete, but officially it took him all day. After he completed his mail route, he'd go to the gym, run errands, etc, then show up at the end of the day to clock out. Apparently he was far from alone in this. The mail routes had been established long before and were passed on from carrier to carrier, none challenging the fiction that gave them so much free time. Their supervisors must have been aware of this given how long it had been going on, but apparently they had no incentive to interfere.
Another example: there was a precinct in the Bronx many years ago where the police would fulfill their parking ticket quota by going down a block and issuing tickets to every car, regardless of meter state. People who lived in the area were aware of this and regularly contested the tickets. Eventually someone noticed that the contest rate was extremely high and almost always successful and they got in trouble. They apparently felt no incentive to ensure that their ticketing raised revenue for the city or encouraged meter use. Their sole motive was meeting the quota.
I could list many other examples of where government employees, without incentives to do their job, did them poorly or not at all. High profile ones like the police are actually more accountable than many of the smaller agencies. In my experience it's not unusual to find yourself waiting for days for a person to sign a piece of paper which is sitting on their desk. Clearly that person is not being evaluated on whether your needs get attention and no other motive is at play. But this is actually one of the more successful outcomes. In many places, bribery is necessary to get people to do their job.
In short, incentives are always a problem, public or private. In order to get things done well, it is necessary that incentives are constructed properly. That takes effort and instances of failure to do it properly abound for both public and private institutions.
Congratulations; you've essentially re-invented tax farming, as was popular in the Roman Empire.
We know from _literally millennia_ of bitter experience that giving private companies a cut of whatever they manage to extract from the general public is a very bad idea. If you pay someone more the more they abuse the rules (these things are virtually impossible to police), then you can't be surprised when they break the rules.
Portugal does it, with the associated nefarious effects.
I don't think this was really viable in the pre-smartphones era, but now every private parking cop can (and would be required to) take copious photos with a cheap device. This should really minimize any shadiness in the system.
Assuming the system will work the way you expect it to work, and not fail into more lucrative modes that are trivial to predict.
"I can't think of a flaw, so my plan must be flawless" is a pretty arrogant position and rarely leads to good plans.
You might have heard of France, I guess? The city where I live uses (Suresnes, just next to Paris) uses a private company to manage parking tickets in street parking; but I've got no idea how the incentives are structured and how well (or not) it works
Left-wing article on the subject: http://www.regards.fr/actu/societe/article/paris-les-voyous-...
Mostly center-right, rural article on the subject: https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/impots-fiscalite/pv-sta...
TFDR (Too French, didn't read): Basically, across all media, including the "Figaro" (notorious right-wing paper who often push for privatization), this isn't going that well.