[notyourday]

Not at all. Those who have cars and can afford the fine consider parking fines to be a cost of doing business. Get a ticket, pay it on the web.

Now if the car is towed that becomes a problem because just pulling out a credit card does not fix it.

[leetcrew]

> Those who have cars and can afford the fine consider parking fines to be a cost of doing business.

I don't. if the fine is $50 and it costs $5 to park, I will pay unless I suspect enforcement is so lax that I have a >90% chance of getting away with it.

[jlarocco]

> I don't. if the fine is $50 and it costs $5 to park, I will pay unless I suspect enforcement is so lax that I have a >90% chance of getting away with it.

That amounts to the same thing. You obey the regulations (pay for parking) except when you think it's cheaper not to. Companies do the same thing. Most of the time it works out, but sometimes there's a fine.

[leetcrew]

the above poster is saying that parking fines don't work so you gotta escalate and tow the person's car. I'm saying you don't have to do that, just hire a few more meter enforcement people and stick with fines that are proportional to the offense. personally, I think $40-50 is a reasonable fine for attempting to subvert parking regulations. if you park in a way that blocks a whole lane of traffic, you have caused a big bigger and time sensitive problem that justifies a tow truck.

[notyourday]

You can see it every day in the cities. UPS/Fedex delivery trucks getting tickets every day. What happens? Companies simply pay the fines because it is a daily fine. So at say $100 per ticket it is just $3k/mo per truck to do deliveries. Since the company makes more than that per truck for that period of time it is the cost of doing business.

Want to stop it? Make this cost high enough to make it non-profitable. If a ticket for illegal double parking is $5k and not $100 then a daily ticket means $150k in fines per truck per month, which is definitely higher than the amount of money a delivery company makes per truck, so the company is going to avoid getting fines.

[leetcrew]

I live in a city, but I'm not sure I've noticed ups doing this. just to be clear are you talking about parking without paying or double-parking (a much more serious offense)?

if they're double-parking, do they do this because there isn't a reserved dropoff space? what do USPS trucks do when they deliver to these buildings?

[notyourday]

I'm talking about any parking violations, from not paying metered, to parking in the no parking zones, to double parking etc.

> if they're double-parking, do they do this because there isn't a reserved dropoff space? what do USPS trucks do when they deliver to these buildings?

USPS delivers significantly less often - typically there's going to be a single delivery vehicle for all USPS services, while FedEx/UPS/DHL will have a vehicle per class of service.

USPS also double parks, parks in a non-parking spots but they tend not to have tickets on their vehicles.

[zapzupnz]

I don't believe for a second that this represents the minority. One might be tempted to conjure reddit-like images of Chads and Karens who park their cars where ever, when ever, and for however long they like, but the majority of people aren't like this.

[notyourday]

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Parking-Violat...

That's 11.7M violations for fiscal 2018.

[zapzupnz]

And? What does a page full of data tell me? At a quick glance I can see a lot of violations made repeatedly for the same licence plate; there's no data on whether certain violations are made multiple times by the same person with different vehicles; it's not easy to tell what kinds of violations there are, how much of each, and which are easy to get tickets from unscrupulous parking attendants or which would require actual lack of action by the vehicle's driver or owner… this isn't evidence of anything.

The population of New York may be only 8.5 million, but that doesn't make 11 million infractions an indicator that the majority of those people are the sorts of people to accept parking fines as the cost of owning a vehicle.

[notyourday]

This actually illustrates that the same license plates get tickets i.e. getting parking tickets is the cost of doing business.

[zapzupnz]

That doesn't say anything about whether these people represent the majority, which was my point, though. Not sure why those stats should matter to me.

[zapzupnz]

Ahh, I meant to say "I don't believe for a second that this represents the majority"! Man, this comment makes no sense. Apologies.