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by libria 16 hours ago
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.

4 comments

"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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But you get two rides a day. You’re gonna be stuck in your little quadrant your whole life.
And in SF your car will be broken into at least 2x/year, unless you always have protected garage parking everywhere you go.