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Comment by libria | Hacker News Reader

Add tag tax, residential parking, subsidized work parking, maintenance, incurred violations, tolls.

400/mo or 5000/yr for not having to worry about all that plus never playing the "wait let's circle the block, maybe a spot has opened up" game... sounds tempting.

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"Incurred violations" should be effectively $0. How often are you getting a traffic ticket? I think the last time I got a ticket was a decade ago...

Spread across a city probably more than you think, especially if you include parking tickets. I've never had a driving ticket, and maybe 4 parking ones over decades, but I'm probably on the lower end of the curve. In their first 40 days of operation, Oakland's speed cameras issued 82,000 tickets according to reports. I welcome those as they make streets safer, and I think they should be low cost, but high frequency.

I would expect tickets issued during the first 40 days to be higher than later, as people haven't adjusted yet

Or lower because the system is under public scrutiny and they don't wanna tune it for revenue just yet. Hard to say because nobody who makes such decisions gets that high in government by writing down their deliberation on such matters.

Yeah, that seems like an odd factor to include. The whole message of fines is supposed to be "don't do these specific anti-social things" not "be sure to factor in the arbitrary charges you'll be hit with".

You'd be surprised at how many people will only see the latter. When they introduced congestion pricing in NYC, there were actually people who were commenting, completely unironically, along the lines of "There's no way I'm going to pay that, I'll just take the train. That'll show em!"

They 100% saw the fee as solely a means to tax residents, and didn't even consider that the primary purpose could be to change behavior.

I saw some wildly ignorant videos on YouTube of objectively wealthy people complaining about needing to driving (a few blocks!) to 59th Street to visit a relative, but needing to pay the congestion fee. I think these people have no idea how insulated there are from the Real World.

If you live in a city, parking tickets are fairly inevitable. I am sure some folks get away with none but at least in SF I have gotten tickets that were not even for the correct meter and it’s takes more time (at least used to) to fight it than pay the money.

I lived in LA for over a decade with a car and got zero parking tickets. I wouldn't call it inevitable.

I've never lived in Los Angeles but the one that gets you in San Francisco if you do street parking is the street cleaning, and the random vandalizations.

Great? Too many variables such as not having to park on the street or bad/good luck. If you live somewhere that has street cleaning, street parking and meters there is a good chance of getting a ticket. Not everyone but the likelihood increases and most of LA does not really check most of those boxes at least in the areas I have been.

Street cleaning days/times are posted and if they aren't - you can contest and win the case. Meters? It's easy to NOT park in one hour zone if you need more than an hour. It's easy to avoid parking next to fire hydrant.

I have a friend that often parks in 30 minutes zone, for her hour-long yoga, sometimes she gets a ticket, but that's a gamble she is willing to make. You don't magically get tickets in big city, you get tickets because you ignored the rules willingly. Couldn't find parking because you were in a rush? Who decided to not account for "time to find parking time"?

Cool story. YMMV but for anyone that has lived in more urban cities it’s pretty normal to get at least a few parking related tickets. Not always but also not rare. In my example I already shared I would get meter tickets especially on my motorcycle where the looked at the wrong meter stall. Too much trouble to bother fighting. Just a cost of living in a city.

Glad it works for you but it’s not unreasonable to consider it a partial cost of living in a city. It’s easy to pick out the folks that have not owned cars in dense cities.

But you get two rides a day. You’re gonna be stuck in your little quadrant your whole life.

maintenance, petty car body degradations.. things gets pricey real fast

I've got 200,000 miles on my Toyota and it's only ever had oil changes, brake pads, and new tires.

It'll probably make it another decade. Or two.

Did you know before hand this would be the case ? cause even when choosing a model that was deemed well made and long-lasting, we hit an unfortunate engine belt timing failure (100k cars were concerned, we got one..) and had to replace the whole thing.

How many times did you replace the timing belt (and probably water pump) before the failure ? Curious what vehicle this is

It was a nissan micra k12, and I used the wrong term, it's not a belt it's a timing chain (metallic) allegedly designed for longer longevity, but there was an industry issue (bad alloy or something) that made them stretch and lose sync with the timing chain counter circuit. The ECU would trip and rapidly the engine would just stop (quite dangerous depending on which road your on). Car mechanics had to swap the whole engine.. we sold it not long after that.

Many years ago (like 30) an old neighbour of mine gave me his Nissan Micra K10 because the timing belt had snapped. It had been his first car that he'd bought, and he couldn't bring himself to scrap it. I bought him a pint, because we were in the local pub, and fair exchange is no robbery.

So, we towed it up to my house with my mate's Suzuki Jeep, and I set about removing the head. Sure enough, belt snapped, wrapped round the cam pulley, all eight valves bent.

It turns out, my mum's neighbour used to use K10s as her driving school cars, and when one had been written off in an accident her husband had pulled the engine. But, now he wanted his shed cleared to get his boat in, and would I mind giving him a hand? Yes of course I'd give him a hand, and he gave me the engine.

So 25 quid or so of my hard-earned dole money and I bought a Haynes manual for the Micra (which I still have, the manual not the car), a head gasket set, a timing belt set, and six tins of beer, and set about reassembling the engine with the good head off the engine from the shed. It took a few hours of a nice Sunday afternoon and by early evening it was back together and would start and run, come up to temperature, no bubbles in the coolant, no funny noises, smooth as silk.

I put another 85,000 miles on that in the next four years before it eventually got to the point where it was just too rotten to consider welding any more.

I kind of wish I'd just chucked it into a nice dry shed and left it until I could properly strip the shell and weld it up. It would be tax and MOT exempt by now, a historic vehicle! Can you imagine, a historic D-reg Micra?

Yes, if you get a Toyota and maintain it, it would be expected to make it past 200k miles. They are by far the most reliable cars. Timing belt failures are only catastrophic for interference engines, and most cars use timing chains now, which have a much lower failure rate.

I wonder if you live in a very warm dry part of the world where it doesn't rain and they don't salt the road?

In $job-2 we had a small fleet of Toyota pickups that were leased brand new, returned to the leasing company at three years old just before they were due their first MOT. They were picked up from our workshop, and driven straight to the scrapyard and crushed. There wasn't a hope in hell of them passing even their first MOT.

You should really think about changing out the engine and cabin air filters. And spark plugs. And unless you are driving 50,000 miles per year, I can't imagine the battery is going to last too much longer.

And in SF your car will be broken into at least 2x/year, unless you always have protected garage parking everywhere you go.

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