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  So they are deliberately extorting local business people

lol, no.

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

Having worked in the smart parking meter industry I got to talk to city folks and, while it may be painful to hear the actual enforcement rate is pretty darn low with a few exceptions (typically time of day based ones like street cleaning and rush hour traffic). It's extremely labor intensive to monitor every spot, so enforcement is pretty haphazard.

  the definition of "a block" is quite loose

This is, in California, defined on a city by city basis as far as I can tell. San Francisco defines the minimum distance as 1/10 mile (or 1 block), Pismo Beach specifies 100 ft or 1/10 mile on the odometer. Both of which seem pretty specific.

Those distance definitions of a block do not make any sense to me. Going from one street to the next is a block to me.

SFMTA says this:

  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!

They're not defining the length of a block, rather they're giving you two options. The end goal is to encourage vehicle turnover and prevent people from monopolizing all the spots in a given area.

Here in London targeted use of parking enforcement is an infamous money-spinner for local authorities - in instances where they know they can clean up: case in point, our local hospital has basically no on-site parking, only metered parking on local roads. The problem of course is that people going to a hospital appointment have no accurate idea how long the wait plus appointment time will be. Hence, there is a bloke on a scooter on permanent patrols looking for anyone who is a few minutes over so he can do them.

London has one of the best public transport networks in Europe.

Being good at A is not an excuse for abusing users of B.

Would you feel good about the fact that a city with an amazing road network abuses public transport users ?

Hospitals are a really obvious case where someone may not be able to travel by public transportation.

i'm struggling to think of cases where it is safer to drive a car than to be carried by subway or bus

Highly contagious disease with symptoms mild enough for you for it to be safe to drive. Like COVID in early 2020.

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.

Because sometimes someone (a partner, a friend, etc.) is driving for you.

Yes, you could take a taxi, but that can easily cost more than parking, even when parking is as expensive as in London.

I wonder why 100 feet or 0.1 mile (528 feet) are alternatives.

A car's trip odometer measures distance in 1/10 mile increments.

Two hour parking (I'm guessing it's free, but it doesn't really matter) is the result of such a mind-numbingly obvious market inefficiency. Street parking is being given away for free, or at incredibly cheap prices, so of course demand is high and drivers visiting businesses can't find spots. So the city tries to disrupt demand by placing these artificial time limits, in the hope that it will allow visitors to park more easily. The obvious answer is to just charge market rate for street parking, and there will almost always be a few spots available. And anybody willing to pay market rate for 8 hours of street parking is welcome to.

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!

> The obvious answer is to just charge market rate for street parking, and there will almost always be a few spots available

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.

If it's impossible to find a spot, you could benefit from higher prices for parking which ensure a spot is available when you need one.

And we use prices to allocate scarce resources for everything. "But first the revolution" is a classic stalling tactic to prevent meaningful change.

>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.

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.

> Are you arguing that cars (along with all associated costs like fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc) be provided free of charge to every person?

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

> 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.

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.

I got a ticket due to a poorly designed "smart" parking meter.

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.

Depending on where you live it could be as simple as you're not allowed to park at a broken meter. It's possible but unlikely that there's any sort of occupancy sensor.

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/01/13/should-parking-be-allo...

there was definitely a sensor facing the car - three little windows and one of them blinking an led.

Yeah that's almost certainly not an occupancy sensor. Out here the single space meters have green LEDs for when it's legal to park (e.g. non-metered hours, or metered hours and the meter has been paid) and red for when the it's not legal to park there. This is so that someone passing by can quickly identify which meters to focus on.

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.

> And then they denied it.

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]"

Bend, OR has this system (or did, a few years ago). I called up the phone number on the ticket and the guy was able to look up the photos and see that I had moved my car across the street and threw the ticket out for me without a hassle.

Dumb system, but they at least handled its failure pretty well.

That's the second half of my beef with the city - you can only fight these tickets on Thursday afternoons between 2-4 by going in to "traffic court." Bull crap.

Love this - someone downvoted me because I'm angry about the difficulty in access to our justice system. Brilliant. Stay classy HN.

Why is it on demand to review, but automated to bill? Seems like the brain rot extends to even the lowliest of lows.

You're clearly not in growth mindset.

I have a similar story - a local strip mall allows parking for 2 hours, no return within 4 hours.

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.

I am so glad I no longer live in areas where the parking enforcement is more strict than "we noticed that you have a burning tractor trailer on the street for the last month, need some help with it?"

> no return within 4 hours.

must be a very popular strip mall if they are willing to say "visit us, but not too much!"