When the goal becomes to cause the behaviour more often so that your can collect more fines, the entire system is just fundamentally broken.
A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour. Paint the curb bright red, for starters.
It shows how the city updated the paint marks for 2 of those illegal parking spots after they were made aware of the issue.
Apparently it worked to get the Soviet diplomats to stop parking in front of hydrants.
Remember the truck has a couple of minutes supply of water onboard, so hooking up to a hydrant immediately isn't the top priority anyways.
Fun. Then we get kids putting a cardboard box over the hydrant and playing "what box?" after smashing your windows.
Varies by municipality: when parking anywhere, look for blue reflectors in the middle of the road. There's usually one or two per street. They denote where the fire hydrants are so the FD can easily find them when cars block curbside visibility. You can use the same feature to avoid hidden hydrants yourself.
In marching band, we referred to those as Smurf Shit, and the drum captain would whack the snare a particular way to let the rest of the band know of its presence so nobody tripped over it
Although not in love with fire hydrants as a revenue source either.
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/work-van-full-debris-its-way...
Hydraulic cutters are slow AF and they're not going to remove bulk material that is in the way.
That would still not really align incentives. If a particular action (parking next to a fire hydrant) produced revenue for that department, they will be financially incentivized to encourage more of that action, not less of it.
If the government somehow lost money rather than gained money when someone did something naughty, then maybe they'd work to try to reduce that naughty behavior.
A DDA study determined that 43% of visitors were being fined.
As a result of getting ticketed, I've heard many people in say they won't visit [redacted] anymore.
So I guess that's one way to discentivize yourself.
Your assumption is that fines discourage. If fines discourage, and the goal is to maximize discouragement, that will occur when fines are maximized.
...unless you think the fines are so large that we've gone past the peak discouragement point, where people are so scared of the fines that they no longer maximize their misbehavior. In this case, if we decrease fines, revenue to the city will increase! the Laffer parking curve!
The beatings will stop when morale improves.
The best solution (and, no, I'm not joking) would be destroy all funds raised in government fines, nationwide. Send the fines directly to the Federal Reserve balance sheet.
Fines generally suck anyway, because they allow people that can easily afford them to break the law.
The supply of community service hours is decentralized and 501(c)(3) organizations have limited input into law enforcement, so the government has less incentive to increase non-compliance to increase citations.
Also fun to see the entire C-suite of a company get 1000 hours of community service each instead of a fine paid by shareholders whose only mistake was hiring them.
I can form a 501c3 today, and as long as it doesn't funnel earnings to an individual (other than a very lavish salary) I could let people 'donate' their time at one of my community service parties, pay me a small fee, and issue a small donation to some local cause.
Using fines as a "revenue source" introduces so many perverse incentives into the system that it automatically becomes corrupt.
See: the incestuous relationships between the towing/repossession companies and the police.
Fines are good as deterrent. Fines should always go back to the public--they should never become state revenue. This breaks the incentives.
Then how will they be able to milk the citizens for millions a year? It's in their best interest to keep everything as confusing as possible so they can trap as many people as they can.