Replacing bad systems with bad systems
seths.blog
seths.blog
On a visit to Denmark I saw their simple system. You car has a plastic clock face mounted on the inside of the windshield. When you park, you set the clock hands to the current time. Parking enforcement then knows how long the car has been there. If you try to cheat and set a later time, and get caught, you get a fine. If you overstay the time limit, you get a fine.
No meters, no coin collection, no apps, no accounts, no personal data. Very simple and effective.
Then anyone walking by can see the time that you parked the car
Not exactly a very high-tech system ; )
It is just fiddly to input the fare zone on those cheap rubbery buttons and you do need to take it to a store occasionally to fill it up with credit. If you want to overstay you would need two of these devices, I don't know if they had any security to prevent that. I can't find any pictures so I guess smartphones and a central database have made them obsolete.
This is common in several countries in Europe. Typically a white dial / black digits rotating inside a square blue disk [0].
In Belgium the streets where that metering system is used (but the city also uses other metering systems: it's on a street by street basis) have a little picture of that disk printed on the street at regular intervals. It's very common to have some streets where parking is totally free, others that use this plastic clock disk and yet others that use a more common metering system.
It's a thing to set your timer on your phone to 1h55 minutes, knowing you have 5 minutes left to go advance the disk by two hours (yup, cheating).
Another common one is that typically at night parking is allowed, so you park on monday evening and directly set the clock to 8am. So you're good until 10am.
They are of course illegal.
For that matter, even if it only moves in steps you could still be unlucky in several ways. For example if the parking inspector is looking at it at the same time as it makes a big leap forward in time.
If the area is subject to multiple inspections every day then the parking inspector might also notice that the same car is sitting in the same spot between multiple inspection rounds over many hours. No amount of technologically advanced timers will help the cheater then.
Perhaps someone could also invent car paint that changes colour every hour :p and then hope the parking inspector and everyone else are not looking the moment the colour changes.
That, also exists:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23540358/bmw-color-changin...
The objective of the meter is to raise revenue though
I don’t believe parking revenue is that large, but I don’t really track it (feel free to surprise me). Just collecting and managing the fees is expensive, as the article specifies.
tl;dr if you can't read it due to GDPR:
>Parking meter revenues are nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. With 61 years to go on the 75-year lease, Chicago Parking Meters LLC has now recouped its entire $1.16 billion investment, plus $502.5 million more.
Gross revenue is roughly $12/resident/year, and that's not factoring in administrative costs, staffing, etc.
That's pretty small change.
If admin costs and staffing come anywhere even close to that, the contractor is screwing up.
>Since 2009, CPM has invested $38 million to modernize the City’s on‐street parking, replacing 36,000 outdated single‐space, coin‐operated ‘meters’ with 4,700 state‐of‐the‐art pay stations that accept both credit and debit cards. In addition, CPM has established a refund option, a 24‐hour customer service center and a state‐of‐the‐art maintenance and repair process.
https://parkchicago.com/about/
So one year's profit investment into infra.
I think every car in Europe has this parking clock/disk.
If you do not have the clock, then piece of paper and written time is also OK.
I definitely rented a car in Switzerland before pandemic that did not have the disk and I had to buy it at some tourist info center.
The apps are similar, and you can use one of several apps, issued by several different private companies (who also maintain their own parking spaces). Some places, however, finding the nearest meter, or payment machine to be more accurate, can be a bit of a trek, so it's not super convenient, if you don't use the app, like me.
But the new versions are easier for the governments. Here they have cars driving around with cameras automatically checking the license plates to see if you paid.
Then someone made a device that would form a network in all the cars using them to detect the cars in advance so you can quickly pay via your app, but the judge blocked them.
Humans being human
In my town (small town near Paris), in some places downtown we have machines that scan the licence plates; first 30 minutes are free, and if you stay longer you get a ticket; everything is automated and doesn't involve anyone for enforcement.
And elsewhere in France there are parking machines where you pay using a credit/debit card and type in your licence plate, and there are patrol cars that scan all the plates and match them to those in the database with date/time, and if they have overstayed the ticket is sent automatically.
(Yes, this particular design only works if your goal is to increase turnover for parking spaces, rather than to collect revenue for parking spaces. But a lot of the time that is the goal, and yet we use the design that collects revenue anyway.)
When most people do the right thing without being prompted, simple solutions are easy.
From someone that works with government payment systems, he has no idea how software, governments, or payments systems work.
I’m not so sure about that. His blog is one of the most well-respected blogs out there.
Interesting chap.
I'm not a marketer. His take on things isn't that big a deal to me, but he has come up with a lot of really good insights, over the years.
People on HN have been posting his stuff for at least five years: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=seths.blog
It's not clear what point is being made here. A benefit of distributed systems over non-distributed (centralized?) systems? Why can't centralized systems improve over time?
> Success is often hidden in the gaps, and you must pivot purposefully in order to find it.
In practice distributed systems tend to fossilize much faster and almost all innovation is in centralized layers on top of them...
Another thing is that an institue of higher learning can be judged by how easily its graduates can get hired doing what they were trained to do, in other words they are meeting a real ongoing need.
So if you were going to try and assure the most opportunities for practitioners overall in the long run, would it really pay off the most to train students to replace bad systems with truly better or even "good" systems once and for all?
"Classic" parking meters are right next to the stop where parked, and the "heavy" coins, are right in the center console of my car so they are "handy".
Newer parking meters where a centralized ticketing system collects the coins, bills, or card payment then spits out a ticket or takes the license plate is just as convenient. This does require to walk to the meter.
Traveling around the world, the best solutions I found are the ones that do not require electronics by the parking person (e.g., cell phone, transponder), and take local currency, not just credit card. Walking 30m to a station to pay, get a ticket or enter license tag/plate numbers is perfectly acceptable.
I went to the Town Hall and signed up for my resident pass (via QR code). I then talked to the Parks person to inquire/plead my case to avoid the ticket. He admitted that it was a new system, and he wasn't sure what would happen. (It's done my a 3rd party in Florida).
I'll be interesting to see if something shows up in the mail, or not, in a few weeks. Either way, I'll be checking back with the Parks person and let him know.
Interresting insight
One could argue that certain static portrait poses are distantly derived from the look of portraits produced in the early days of photography, and that look is a cultural expectation. There's plenty of portrait photography that does not replicate 19th century stylistic elements.
or is it just to prevent people from parking forever
Long time ago we had this huge parking building. They charged around $3 per hour, $10 for a whole day and $15 for a new ticket when you accidentaly lost your original. Didn't take long for people to figure out what to do if you wanted your car parked relatively safely for more than 1 day :)
My old apartment complex had run out of parking spaces, they then required everyone to register their vehicles or face towing. Around 20 cars were towed because the owners no longer even lived in the complex, or were just using it like a spare garage.
In downtown Orlando you see all the people who live "van life" or out of their car, they all park around 7pm when parking becomes free and then leave by 9am when it is pay for again.
Thankfully with the 3 hour limit, they are forced to move around, even if its just to other spots, its less convenient than other options.
What a Chad. I wish I could learn even a tiny fraction of his unapologetic shamelessness. I want to call him my guru and travel many miles to study at his feet and receive his wisdom.