100 Parking Tickets (2004)
100parkingtickets.com
100parkingtickets.com
The full story with references: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3/12#subj1
RISK-DIGEST mailing list is still going strong as (I think) the predecessor to and kinda the moderated version of comp.risks. Very highly recommended.
He was born in 1932, and would be over 90 now. Which would seem something of a comp.risk of itself.
RISKS-Digest is a valuable and venerable resource. I find it somewhat ironic that it seems not to have any specific preparation for transition or continuity.
That's a challenge for numerous projects, and I can think of several examples of projects, services, or other institutions which failed on the death, disability, or retirement of their founders. It's a highly foreseable risk.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/wiseguy-changes-license...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/19/can-y...
Turns out she got her answer to her original question via a phone call. Maybe she should have tried that route first.
Shame, it doesn't seem to violate policy. They should have been forced to do a full legal name change, and a welfare check on the other kids wouldn't be out of line either.
"Drysdale said she was under the impression that if a name was rejected by the registry, they choose one for you."
Surely this person is just some sort of attention seeker. Nobody is this dumb.
In some countries it does work this way.
Luckily for the kid, when you change your name in Australia you are issued an entirely new birth certificate (I know because I changed my name!) so this child won't go through life with this name on its birth certificate and then a "change of name" certificate like in some countries.
More generally though, dome countries have a list of permitted names and whatever the registrar writes down (which might not be what you asked for) is the child's name.
Most of the European countries that had such rules have relaxed or given them up, though they sometimes remain on the books to keep parents from doing this kind of thing, but they remain in some countries in other regions of the globe.
This "whatever the registrar writes down is authoritative" applied to immigrants to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century which is why there are many common names spelled differently (Schmidt, Shmitt, and so forth). Also applied to family names when they were made mandatory (Prussia in mid 19th century, Turkey in the 1920s). In this case they often simply made the decisions with no option to appeal, which you can see Jewish family names that are joke names made up and assigned by antisemitic officials. Most of those people's descendants now live in other countries where the meaning is thankfully lost.
The agency had indicated that a name would be chosen by the registrar but wouldn't tell her what it would be, so she aimed to find out.
Not what I'd do, but I think it's curiosity and maybe flippant more than dumb.
Not having a last name has caused her all kinds of problems. Australia may not officially require you to have a last name, but passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, utilities, etc., still require there to be something in that space. She kinda-sorta gets by using "[first name] [firstname]" or "[first name] NoLastName", but it is still a bureaucratic nightmare -- as I think anyone but her could have predicted.
And I think changing your maiden name in marriage is still common in the west, so many foreigners run into this in a country like China.
Many Indonesians don’t have last names, I wonder how immigration is handled. Wiki has a whole section on how other countries handle this, since Indonesia isn’t a small country:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_names#:~:text=by%....
One name, not first, not last. And it wreaked havoc with all of our IAM processes as a result.
Which brought up all the other issues with IAM...for a minute we had an issue with names like O'Malley
In southern India it's common for the last name to simply be the father's name (but I do know one guy whose last name is his mother's name).
Like, my name could be "Foo", my father's name could be "Baz" so the given name field of the passport could be "Foo Baz", and the last name would be blank.
But the visa form for certain countries don't accept that, so they put in "LNU".
Anyway, these days people are more aware, so when applying for passport they specify the given name as "Foo", and the surname as "Baz" (parent's name), even though that's really not the surname.
The occassional tow notice always elicits a chuckle — I no longer even respond to them. Citations/notices are few-and-far, as the authorities have made note to not use my lawful license plate as a default "no plate on vehicle" descriptor.
"NV" is a valid value for a plate. The officers were using that value to indicate an error, thus the chaos of error handling for a non-error.
When programming error cases, you should return something that cannot be a valid value. Excellent patterns exist in some languages where a sum type of either a return value or an error can be returned. Optional/Maybe monads to indicate something or nothing. Even, god forgive me for saying this, throwing an Exception is a good way to say "No, not a valid return value".
The traffic wardens paperwork/app needs an explicit field for "Not visible"- ideally one easier to use than writing "NV", rather than a free-form text field that lets them write a value that only they know means something other than a real value.
When I got a ticket nothing happened because the two state authorities didn't exchange information about car ownership for parking and traffic violations. I ran up probably $20,000 dollars worth of tickets pretty quickly, given I could park with impunity in a place where parking was impossible or super expensive (central Sydney). Also various speeding tickets.
Then I got a contract with the local driver licensing authority. My job: facilitate exchange of information between states for penalties associated with out of state plates.
I know what you're thinking: just filter out anything to do with my licence plates. But that would be unethical (cough). And I'd get caught.
As it happened, the first task was to apply it to trucks who were the worst offenders since they routinely travelled between states and there were obvious safety issues.
So I asked my boss about when the same would be done for out of state cars, "out of curiosity".
He said "20 years to never. It's too hard [for bureaucratic reasons]".
No not at all, I was thinking you sound like a selfish git.
Hey, man. Cool hack. I’m sure everyone appreciated the dangerous driving and parking in handicap spots and bus lanes and what-have-you…
Don't assume the worst in people.
"Also various speeding tickets." -- The opposite of parking.
"I ran up probably $20,000 dollars worth of tickets pretty quickly" -- I read this as "within a year or so I got fines totaling around $20k," which is fucking nuts.
- mostly street parking over the 2 hour limit. I couldn't get a residency parking permit and I had no off street parking.
- not paying or overstaying parking meters
- loading zones, mostly on the weekend, I worked during the week
- sometimes 'no parking' zones, but I wasn't stupid about it because you'd get towed
- exclusively speed camera fines, I never got pulled over for speeding.
- using high occupancy lanes with just the driver
Keep in mind that a single parking ticket was up to $375 at the time. Speeding fines were minimum $300 (they're like $2000 now).
The $20,000 is an estimate, since I never got the fines, that's over a couple of years. I later did register a car in state and ended up not paying fines again (somehow) which ran to about $15,000 over a year (At the time there was no effective punishment. They used to lock you up until you paid, but then some poor guy who refused to pay was put in prison and beaten to within an inch of his life, consequently becoming disabled for life, so they got rid of that. There is another funny story about how I narrowly avoided arrest a decade later for all these fines when walking into a police station to get the required police check for getting my Diversity Visa approval).
Obviously there is a difference between not paying your fines and blocking buses or traffic. Besides it being stupid, if you get towed, are in a serious accident, or the police attends and they run your plates, then the jig is up, they've found you and you're toast. There was an element of risk involved at all times.
[1]: https://www.masslive.com/news/2022/01/massachusetts-man-suin...
[2] https://www.nbcboston.com/investigations/the-mass-rmv-issued...
I'm amazed there's not at least a system where you can quickly say "have a human verify this, this isn't me" via a text or button click.
But in all that time, I literally do not know anyone who has gotten a bill from them for a bad plate read. We have blizzards here, torrential downpour rain, all kinds of weather that might make it hard. Still, nothing.
I wonder if the regulations on bad reads were simply made serious enough that the company handling it takes a very conservative approach to potential mistakes.
Also, why get an entire domain to host a short blog post? Based on the copyright of 2004 and a .com tld registration of $10 per year someone has spent $190 to put this story out there.
(Someone already archived it 4 years ago!)
and multiple archive.org references: https://web.archive.org/web/20230422095738/http://100parking...
On a blog. Each post normally gets its own page but not its own domain name.
It does allow for 2 websites, so perhaps this one is riding free on something else the owner does.
Kind of reminds me of the employee whose last name is Null.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-to-pass-null...
Though this is kind of the opposite where a manual process misidentifies the value instead of an automated process.
What happened?… I’m irritated that I got tricked into reading this.
No matter what though, it’s a terrible story. It sucks you in with an engaging problem, and then leads you exactly nowhere.
the police use NV for "Not Visible"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580270 (thanks mabbo)
I can imagine human ingenuity is such that there are a huge number of possible 'bad', placeholder number plates used - in addition to the 'NV', 'NULL' and 'NO PLATE' listed in comments, imagine we could have 'NONE', 'NA' (i.e. N/A), 'BROKEN', 'ABSENT', etc.
It's easy to do. Go to the bar almost every day after work, and leave your car either on the street or in the city parking lots and come back and get it the next day. The late fees and penalties really add up!
The funny part is the local newspaper would do a story on the highest amounts owed for parking tickets and she was only ever in third or fourth place.
Eventually they boot your car and you have to go down and write a check
Dumb system, but they at least handled its failure pretty well.
I parked and put change in the meter and it didn't seem to register. I was a little confused, and put it in the meter for the adjacent car and a coin would register and increment the time.
Ugh. So I put a post-it note on the windshield describing the problem and went to eat.
Came back, and you guessed it: post-it gone, replaced by parking ticket.
It wasn't obvious what was happening, and I kind of put it all together afterwards.
The parking meter seems to have some sort of occupancy sensor. I suspect it might reset your time to zero if you leave the spot. reading your comment, it might be a max time in spot sensor? who knows.
I think it needed my car to be detected to add time to the meter. Because it was too far away or not reflective, or whatever, the coins were not accepted to add time. But it did keep the quarters. geez.
I complained on the ticket when it came. Had to pre-pay, but went in and pled my case at the parking authority court. Took two witnesses. They filed something to talk to engineers and said they'd let me know.
And then they denied it. I had the ability to appeal, but by then it was several hours of my time taking off in the middle of the day and I just let them keep the $40.
jerks.
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/01/13/should-parking-be-allo...
Of all the ways you could detect the presence of a car most would be easily obstructed if they're looking from the POV of the meter. Maybe a camera would work, but even if you ignore the ease with which it's obstructed you still run into issues processing the photos. Sure you could also probably fit a small SBC into there, but you'd have no room for a battery powerful enough to run for any meaningful amount of time.
When I was doing that sort of thing professionally we kept the stuff in the meter very simple and our whole thing was built on super low power comms (think lower power consumption than Zigbee). While batteries are easy enough to change out in a meter, having to change them out frequently adds to the operational cost. The costs of trying to determine occupancy outweigh the benefits.
Typically what I've seen is that adding money to the meter just resets the session. Dollars to donuts you just came across a busted meter.
Sounds like The Simpsons. Homer gets a parking ticket, with a number to call for an automated appeals process.
He calls.
"Thank you for appealing your parking ticket. Your appeal has been [no pause] Denied. Have a nice day. [click]"
To top it off, time limits are so stupid to enforce, as you say. It's easy to enforce meters, or paid parking with plates on a block. "If paid and not in red zone, ok, else, ticket." But instead cities have to come up with these "creative" (read: broken) systems for catching people who park too long.
edit: and same applies for weekends: charge market rate then too!
So only the rich can drive and park? FWIW, my city charges £6.70/hour for parking and it's still impossible to find a spot.
> To top it off, time limits are so stupid to enforce, as you say. It's easy to enforce meters, or paid parking with plates on a block. "If paid and not in red zone, ok, else, ticket." But instead cities have to come up with these "creative" (read: broken) systems for catching people who park too long.
The limits on parking in many places are to encourage/force other means of transport for work.
And we use prices to allocate scarce resources for everything. "But first the revolution" is a classic stalling tactic to prevent meaningful change.
Are you arguing that cars (along with all associated costs like fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc) be provided free of charge to every person?
If there's no spots available at the current price, then the current price is too low. There are costs associated with vehicle ownership and usage, and you are welcome to find alternatives if you do not want to pay them.
I work at a hospital and people always lament that they wish the on-site parking was free so they didn't have to park several blocks away. I don't know why they don't realize that if the parking was free, it would be packed full 24/7.
You're putting words in my mouth here, nowhere have I suggested anything like that. Please at least argue in good faith.
> If there's no spots available at the current price, then the current price is too low
You're making an assumption that the only variable is the cost of parking, and that the desire of the system is to ensure maximum utilisation. It's not. The desire of the system is to stop people driving into city centres and parking their cars there while they work
I definitely understand that parking can be a major expense, but I do believe that if the cost of parking is the tipping point (and not the cost of fuel, insurance, registration, repairs/maintenance, and likely regular car payments w/ interest...), then it's a symptom of a larger problem. Car ownership is by definition expensive, and the better approach is to work on making it unnecessary for people to own a car, rather than deciding that we have to further subsidize the car and fossil fuel industry by giving away/underpricing parking.
And yes, I'm definitely sympathetic to the fact that in many places, it's just necessary to own the car in order to live life. But market priced parking is actually part of the incremental solution to change that: it is cheaper to enforce and brings in more revenue which can be directly used to solve those problems, by improving public transit and infrastructure for alternatives to cars. Or it can go to tax rebates/incentives to use these alternatives.
So they are deliberately extorting local business people
Free parking is a great example of tragedy of the commons. Without time limits people will abuse it. Case in point: California. A handicap tag out here will grant you an exemption to whatever time limits are posted regardless of whether or not the spot is reserved for handicapped drivers. What ends up happening is people with handicap tags will just take up all the spots all day, leaving nothing for anyone else.
Or said another way, they got tired of chalking tires
the definition of "a block" is quite loose
The law requires you to move one block away or at least one-tenth (1/10)
of a mile—about 500 feet. Do not drive around and then park in the same
block, or you can be ticketed!
Would you feel good about the fact that a city with an amazing road network abuses public transport users ?
Or, for example, if kid had accident at home that's fairly serious but not serious enough that you actually need ambulance. You want to get them to hospital quickly with minimal walking required but you also likely need parent to stay with them.
Yes, you could take a taxi, but that can easily cost more than parking, even when parking is as expensive as in London.
They enforce this with ANPR cameras - only - sometimes you're inching out of the strip mall and bumper to bumper ... so it doesn't register you leaving.
Got a ticket, but luckily my Nest camera showed the time I returned, and the time I went back (needed something else) and they were more than 4 hours apart, and I'd only parked there for 20 minutes each time. Ticket was waived.
must be a very popular strip mall if they are willing to say "visit us, but not too much!"
NV is kind of a sentinel value to signal "not visible" and to differentiate it from actual plates isn't it? Only that it comes from external (the officer) and the systems involved are not aware of its special meaning which causes all the trouble.
Or how would you name this special value?
Would love to have a smiley or thumbs up character in my plate. Until I tried to pay for parking at a smart meter.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/special-interest-license-...
Wish we could have saved nissan.com
[1]: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Uzi-Nissan?
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950097
[3]: https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-internet-domain-owner-who-fo...
Mr Prawo Jazdy has the most tickets in Ireland, because it means “Driving License” in Polish and cops just copied the wrong words off driving licenses.
[1] https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-the-final-spee...
Among other ideas he shares his view that there shouldn't even be "parking tickets", you just pay for the use of the land at the prevailing market rate.
Seems like a correlation between this demographic and being a sort of male Karen that's really bothered about how other people get around.
Obviously urban planning is an important thing with tradeoffs to consider, I am just talking about the most vehement car haters.
Okay, there's more diversity. But you immediately say this:
> not too many Indians, Chinese, Native Americans, or middle easterns, but that's more for geopolitical reasons
So which is it?
-----
By the way, there's plenty of people from all over the world in the Netherlands :)
My wife with 2 kids that has no twitter account also hates cars. You just don't hear from her because you don't go to the same places she does. The same probably goes for everyone else outside the demographic you're describing.