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Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

This is the fire hydrant in question: https://goo.gl/maps/5C983vRcHCW6Zaq5A

Currently there's construction there so probably the fines are reduced.

Doesn't appear to be any particularly obvious reason this would be a big problem.

Edit: Actually looks like they repainted the lines there in between Aug 2013 and Oct 2014 which makes it much more clear.

Here's 2013: https://goo.gl/maps/NF3xguY2P6FX4JUX7 And 2014: https://goo.gl/maps/Bk6W8bqndCb1Zjvd7

I love how there's a car there in the 2013 shot that likely received a fine.

The goal of the law is to let someone connect a hose to the fire hydrant right? Well even with a car parked in that spot, there is still multiple yards of spare space to connect a hose...

The whole thing smells of someone sticking to the letter not the spirit of the law.

It depends on how accessible to fire trucks that lane is between the cars and the hydrant. If it's a pain for trucks to get in there, they probably usually opt to park in the middle of the street and run the hoses past the cars to the hydrant.

15 feet. Multiple reasons given here:

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-firefighters-need-15-feet-of-sp...

https://archive.ph/ELmoa

Not sure why people are throwing a fit. Space is marked out with lines. Fire hydrant in clear view. I mean it’s painted a non standard color, but it’s clearly a fire hydrant.

$33K per year in 2013 is just a tax on idiots.

Look at the sibling comment. In 2013 it wasn't painted clearly. I imagine now that it's painted clearly, this hydrant is no longer raking in the same amount of fines.

For a lot of vehicle owners, parking tickets in NYC are not an unfortunate event but just a cost of doing business. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, its cheaper to get one or two parking tickets a month than to rent a garage space.

Its kind of a wager, will I pay more in fines or parking garage fees.

For a lot of delivery businesses, its really part of their business model. They know they're getting X amount of fines per month; they bake that into their costs.

Sounds like the price of a ticket should be made dependent on how many other tickets were received. Repeat offenders should have to pay more per incident.

I would 100% support that.

No wonder people have to park in front of the hydrant there, there is absolutely no parking on that street

Why is it placed so close to the road and also directly facing it? As a first step, maybe they could try turning it 90 or 180 degrees and see if that helps increasing accessiblity.

doesn't the fire department connect the hydrant to a pump truck and feed hoses that way rather than connecting hoses directly to the hydrant to fight the fires? kind of hard to park a truck where you're proposing to rotate the hydrant

I guess they could double park and use feed hoses that can tolerate a relatively tight bend?

Were I'm coming from: When a problem keeps happening over and over and over again because it's next to impossible to train 100% of the population to follow every rule to the letter, you work around the problem using design and technology. You don't use fines to create a revenue source.

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