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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Even parking meters were a bad system.

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.

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> On a visit to Denmark I saw their simple system. You car has a plastic clock face mounted on the inside of the windshield.

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.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=disque+de+stationnement

Time to invent a little timer gizmo that fastens to the back of the windshield clock and advances it for you. ;)

Sooooo, like a clock?

This has already been done, but the person got caught and got a fine.

Those exist: https://www.bol.com/nl/p/automatisch-roterende-blauwe-parkee...

They are of course illegal.

I heard about this on Tom Scott's Lateral podcast recently.

Does it move in steps, or does it move continuously? Would be funny if it’s the latter and a parking inspector comes and while they are looking at the dial it is slowly turning around on its own.

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.

To minimize the chance the parking inspector sees the clock advance, you probably just want to do it only once an hour or so.

> Perhaps someone could also invent car paint that changes colour every hour

That, also exists:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23540358/bmw-color-changin...

As others have pointed out, those discs are only for free time-limited parking in Denmark. Some places have parking meters. Those places often use a mixture of physical meters and the option to use an app. The physical meters aren't next to the parking spot, but rather nearby. They ask you to enter your number plate, and they only take payment cards (no cash).

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.

No meters, no coin collection, no apps, no accounts, no personal data. Very simple and effective.

The objective of the meter is to raise revenue though

Typically the primary objective is to make sure there is turnover in parking spaces so that shops can thrive (that’s where the revenue is). That’s why big box stores in the burbs don’t need parking meters — they are captives — but also why the parking lots are so big.

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.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/ch...

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.

Not sure that's quite making the argument you think it is.

Gross revenue is roughly $12/resident/year, and that's not factoring in administrative costs, staffing, etc.

That's pretty small change.

Who cares about per resident? That's $35 million in profit per year already (after paying off the contract). That's not nothing.

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.

Not nothing, but it’s about 1/500th the city budget, which is over $16B/yr

The disc parking thing is mostly done in countries that are ok with the idea of taxing fuel as a proxy to charge for vehicle use.

We had that in France for a long time, but it seems it's no longer used in most places, although it still exists ("disque de stationnement": parking disc, see https://www.securite-routiere.gouv.fr/actualites/nouveau-dis... which says it's a European thing?)

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.

The disks you are talking about needs to be purchased. If you are visiting you may find it hard to find an open spot selling those off business hours. It’s less convenient then coin operated parking meter.

What?

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.

Europe is not just EU or Westen Europe. The system the op is talking about iirc is only for free parking, so it’s not even an alternative to a meter. It’s an alternative to a meter maid making rounds chalking wheels or scanning license plates.

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.

Piece of paper? In Switzerland I got a fine because the paper clock was not 12cm in diameter but like 10

Here is a Wikipedia article about this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_parking

I love this sort of thing. What other overly-complex systems do we take for granted where a simple and robust solution has been possible the whole time?

(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.)

This particular design also only works in a high-trust, high-honesty culture. The complexities of most systems like this are only there to disincentivize bad actors from taking advantage of the system, and as we all know, managing incentives is a difficult problem.

When most people do the right thing without being prompted, simple solutions are easy.

yeah many places, problem is no money for the gov :), the old coins were also fun.

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

What is meant by "current time"? The time zone that you're parking in?

No. Just set the hands to the time that you are parking.

Then anyone walking by can see the time that you parked the car

Basically you point the disk at the time you parked your car and then you've got two hours before you need to move the car (or go advance the disk by two hours, which is not legal but which everybody does. Those that forget do get a fine).

Not exactly a very high-tech system ; )

Israel has or had a cute device, it looks like a digital kitchen timer and flashes the parking fare zone and current time, when you reach the maximum time or run out of credit it turns off. It can also enforce "no return" rules and you can end your stay by pressing a button when you return to the car.

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.

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