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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

That's a little naive.

Local jurisdictions are heavily incentivized to hand out infractions of any kind -- deserved or not. Why? Because they keep the money.

What do they spend the money on? Things like public employees and their benefits, including pensions. It's clearly a perverse incentive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

I've always thought that government shouldn't benefit from fines or seized property. I'm not sure what a good solution is. Perhaps they should take the money from fines and just light it on fire.

There shouldn't be a financial incentive for governments to hand out tickets and fines and seize property - the democratic incentive should be enough.

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As someone who works for local government, I think you are over thinking "heavily incentivized". Governments are heavily incentivized to respond to political whims. It's the reason NYC has free street parking and that North Dakota has no parking meters, despite some cities desperately needing them. The fact that it's so easy to be released from a parking ticket is proof that this isn't some cash cow localities are sitting on.

I frankly see no problem with citizens benefiting from people who don't think parking laws should apply to them through the increased services and lower taxes gained by parking revenue.

> That's a little naive.

Are you saying it is impossible to escape their devious plans, because I have managed to avoid a parking or speeding fine for the last 20 years, simply by following the rules.

It's easy to avoid being ticketed by an incompetent/corrupt parking authority by simply not living in the city they're employed in. You can even keep that up for millennia! That doesn't mean they never give out unjust tickets to the people that do live there.

It's also easy to chalk up thousands of perfectly legitimate parking tickets to a few incompetent/corrupt parking authorities that you have no evidence exist except anecdotal experiences.

I’ve now read a half a dozen comments in this thread that I can sum up as "I once got a parking ticket that I shouldn't have, all parking authorities are incompetent and corrupt." No one's telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to challenge a ticket or to address the issue with your locally elected official.

> No one's telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to challenge a ticket

I think that's exactly what the person I responded to was saying. If obeying the law never results in being issued a ticket, there's no reason they should allow tickets to be challenged.

I'm not sure where you get that at all. I really see no one anywhere saying anything like that.

The starter of this thread is clearly being tongue in cheek.

The next person was addressing that by arguing that corruption causes people to get unnecessary parking tickets.

The next one was saying that he was overstating that because he himself had managed to avoid that (side note: so have I).

I don't think: "you should not be allowed any redress on parking tickets" was ever broached.

What I take out of this is that there are bad parking tickets and there is a system for dealing with bad parking tickets. No system is perfect, all systems have compromises, design flaws and humans who make real mistakes implementing them.

Accepting this I personally feel revenue from parking tickets is an excellent way to keep taxes lower. I happen to see this process in action as part of my employment, so perhaps I am biased. I have also seen places who basically feel the way you do about parking enforcement and I do not like it (I’m looking at New York here). I will take the tradeoffs and if I choose not to, I will address the problems with my elected officials whose job it is to oversee the budget process to avoid exactly the kinds of corruption we’re speculating exists.

> corruption we’re speculating exists

We're not speculating. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. Last summer our traffic courts were permanently closed, their cases turned over to the municipal court system. 9 of the traffic court judges, and 3 other city officials, were indicted on criminal charges related to fraud and corruption.

Good, I'm sure they should be indicted.

But that does not indict all parking tickets everywhere or the system of issuing parking tickets. It indicts a suburb of Philadelphia.

It's like saying that when a sports official gets a call wrong (or even worse, is corrupt), it indicts every team that's ever played that sport and the very act of playing that sport.

If that's what I had tried to imply, you'd have a point. Instead, I'm arguing with someone who says there's no evidence of corruption but a few anecdotes, by providing an example proving otherwise. That was the city of Philadelphia for the record, not just the suburb I live in. Big court, millions of citizens, state legislature had to step in to stop the corruption. And it's not the only ticketing authority in the nation with bonafide, verifiable corruption. You're spreading misinformation by repeatedly making that assertion that it's all speculation.

> It's not like they are walking into your driveway and giving you a ticket.

Yeah, they actually do that too [Google: 19,600 results for ticket "parked in my own driveway", and personal experience]. You're either overtly biased by your employment where you're taking part in this revenue, or you're wholly ignorant of what it's like to park regularly in some of the largest cities in this nation. Either way, your commentary is uninformed.

I believe there's corruption. I believe there's corruption surrounding parking tickets. I would also point out that you are the first person I've read to produce an example of actual corruption surrounding parking tickets that wasn't the equivalent of 19,600 Google results of people complaining about parking enforcement. I don't doubt for a second that all this occurs.

I do however, question this statement, which you seem to be tacitly supporting, though perhaps I'm wrong and we're pursuing semantics down a gopher hole:

"I've always thought that government shouldn't benefit from fines or seized property. I'm not sure what a good solution is. Perhaps they should take the money from fines and just light it on fire.

There shouldn't be a financial incentive for governments to hand out tickets and fines and seize property - the democratic incentive should be enough."

To me that seems flat out ridiculous. Corruption does not make a form of revenue invalid, it means the people who benefited from it should go to jail. With political oversight and transparency, there's no reason that the revenue from fines shouldn't go back into the community in the form of improved services and lower taxes. Government should be transparent and responsive to the political direction of the community, but it shouldn't throw money away.

Agreed.

I've always wondered how differently municipalities would behave were the fines forbidden from funding operations. For example, what if all fines had to be paid to a trust, and only the interest from the trust may be used for capital projects? Then only taxes could be used to pay for operations. At the federal level this change wouldn't make a big difference, but at the local level it would affect 50% of some budgets.

I imagine a lot of what seems like frivolous ticketing would shift towards something else.

Edit: @stinkytaco -- Agreed. Maybe frivolous tickets would be replaced with frivolous taxes? The money does have to come from somewhere, and I agree that the vast majority of civil servants are just enforcing otherwise reasonable laws :) Still a fun thought experiment.

Taxes would be higher, for one. Instead of using that revenue, they would reduce services or raise taxes. When a city department draws up its budget for the year, one of the things they need to account for is expected revenue. Budgets are set based on that revenue. If that revenue were not there, something would have to give.

It's not like they are walking into your driveway and giving you a ticket. People who get tickets are parked illegally. Those who are not are welcome to challenge the ticket and not pay it.

"I've always thought that government shouldn't benefit from fines or seized property. I'm not sure what a good solution is. Perhaps they should take the money from fines and just light it on fire."

In the case of parking violations, it could go towards directly subsidizing the cost of legal parking -- building new structures, etc. That way, you're not creating a perverse incentive of people directly benefitting from the fines they issue.

That's still a perverse incentive; more money in the department who owns that parking budget.

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