Ask HN: can I get a parking ticket?
I think I have stumbled on an exploitable parking lot system by the beach, but I am curious about other perspectives.
Here's the setup (numbers are simplified for clarity): 1) Bunch of parking spaces numbered 1 to 500; 2) You park and note your number and go to the central payment machine; 3) At the payment machine you type in your space number and pop in your coins (crucially you don't get any type of ticket to put on your dashboard or anything to physically indicate you have parked); 4) No gate, no guards, no roof (open-air),no sensors on the spaces themselves, basically no way to know when a car is over its time except by looking at it and checking the machine
I dont think they have any credible enforcement mechanism here. I have seen a car get a parking ticket, but I learned later that its owner made it an obvious target by leaving parked overnight.
HN, is there any credible way for the enforcement folks to catch people who don't pay? If you were in charge of parking revenues for the city what simple solution would you use in this system to catch HN readers who would get away with free parking?
Random checks, with large fines.
That's how it works on many mass transit systems. There's a ticket inspection once every 200 or so trips I'm on. The ticket is $2, and if the fine is $400 or more then it's not economically worthwhile.
In this case, if there's a random check averaging once a week (obviously the best is to allow sometimes multiple checks of the same place in a day) and the average stay costs $1 for an hour, then with 12 hour per day parking, a fine of $84 or more makes it not worthwhile. It would almost certainly be higher.
All parking enforcement needs to do is get a copy of the spots which have paid, and go around checking for occupied spots which are supposed to be available.
The trick in DC where you had meters on the streets, but a two hour limit, was to learn how to properly chalk your tires and parking far enough in the spot to allow you to roll the car back a foot or two - making the chalkmark appear to be 'wrong' and it looked like you moved the car.
With today's systems, they have a handheld device that tells them which spots are paid and they just check to see what spots are unpaid which have cars on a somewhat regular basis. Revenue being down usually brings more stringent enforcement.
My understanding of these parking stall systems is that they often include bundled handheld devices for parking attendants. These handhelds are used to issue tickets and include a nifty feature of alerting the attendant when a particular stall number runs out of time. It is, of course, then up to the attendant to venture to that space and verify that a violator's vehicle remains parked. If they are not on lunch and promptly make such a verification you will most certainly end up with a ticket. This happened to several friends, all of whom were issued tickets two to three minutes after their prepaid time expired. If the attendant is on a lunch break or if there is not a high parking turnover in your lot you might get lucky and be overlooked. Bottom line: it's a risk you are free to take.