100 Parking Tickets (2004)

by thunderbong • 3 years ago

156 130 3 years ago

gangstead• 3 years ago

Great story. So in the end the tickets got dropped?

Also, why get an entire domain to host a short blog post? Based on the copyright of 2004 and a .com tld registration of $10 per year someone has spent $190 to put this story out there.

tysam_and2• 3 years ago

It's a good story Brent

grogenaut• 3 years ago

it wasn't $10/year from 04 on, it was actually more initally then lower and now that. also where would you put the blog post? Facebook? Tumblr? Myspace? Medium? Geocities? Blogspot? Which of those would have kept this blog around that long? and reachable?

Scoundreller• 3 years ago

Let's see how this fares:

https://archive.ph/FbYQs

(Someone already archived it 4 years ago!)

and multiple archive.org references: https://web.archive.org/web/20230422095738/http://100parking...

cm20122• 3 years ago

Not to mention for most Americans, $200 over 20 years amounts to exactly jack.

jstanley• 3 years ago

where would you put the blog post?

On a blog. Each post normally gets its own page but not its own domain name.

I_am_uncreative• 3 years ago

Plus, where is it hosted? Looks like somewhere called inmotionhosting. I wonder how much it costs to host this static page there..

tyingq5• 3 years ago

$2.99/month shared hosting plan. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/home-b

It does allow for 2 websites, so perhaps this one is riding free on something else the owner does.

cm20122• 3 years ago

I'm sure you have spent much more than $200 on something over 20 years that brings you much less joy.

psd1• 3 years ago

E.g. other people's parking tickets.

skaushik92• 3 years ago

Neat story!

Kind of reminds me of the employee whose last name is Null.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-to-pass-null...

Though this is kind of the opposite where a manual process misidentifies the value instead of an automated process.

AmericanChopper3• 3 years ago

Terrible story! Where’s the middle? Where’s the end? The authors describes some kafkaesque problem they encounter, with no obvious solution, and then they just abruptly end the story, signing off with a lighthearted joke.

What happened?… I’m irritated that I got tricked into reading this.

bbreier• 3 years ago

Sometimes life doesn't have three acts! Sometimes life is just a Kafkaesque decent into madness and all you can do is try to cope with a coy joke.

Tempest1981• 3 years ago

This explanation makes sense:

the police use NV for "Not Visible"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580270 (thanks mabbo)

mabbo2• 3 years ago

This is secretly about Types and misuse of values.

"NV" is a valid value for a plate. The officers were using that value to indicate an error, thus the chaos of error handling for a non-error.

When programming error cases, you should return something that cannot be a valid value. Excellent patterns exist in some languages where a sum type of either a return value or an error can be returned. Optional/Maybe monads to indicate something or nothing. Even, god forgive me for saying this, throwing an Exception is a good way to say "No, not a valid return value".

The traffic wardens paperwork/app needs an explicit field for "Not visible"- ideally one easier to use than writing "NV", rather than a free-form text field that lets them write a value that only they know means something other than a real value.

rzzzt• 3 years ago

In-band signaling. They have to agree on an escape character!

BoppreH• 3 years ago

Wouldn't an escape character still be in-band signaling? It should either be something other than a string, like a NULL value, a separate field that says there's no valid plate (and to ignore the string), or have a different type altogether for tickets without valid plates.

awavering• 3 years ago

"Falsehoods Traffic Wardens Believe About License Plates" :)

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

Same thing with the person who had NULL as their plate: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/8/14/20805543/null-licens...

kens• 3 years ago

There was a similar story in comp.risks (anyone remember that?) back in 1986. When ordering a custom plate, you could put down three choices. The guy applying could only think of two choices ("SAILING" and "BOATING"). If he couldn't get one of those, he didn't want a custom plate, so he put "NO PLATE" as the third choice. Of course that was the plate he got. He ended up getting 2500 parking tickets, since any car with no plate was marked on the ticket as "NO PLATE".

The full story with references: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3/12#subj1

kjs3• 3 years ago

comp.risks (anyone remember that?)

RISK-DIGEST mailing list is still going strong as (I think) the predecessor to and kinda the moderated version of comp.risks. Very highly recommended.

rrdharan• 3 years ago

Thank you!

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

Is Peter G. Neumann still the moderator?

He was born in 1932, and would be over 90 now. Which would seem something of a comp.risk of itself.

472719942• 3 years ago

Similar story with a plate that reads "NULL":

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/wiseguy-changes-license...

tragomaskhalos2• 3 years ago

Or indeed this poor sod whose surname is 'Null': https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

prawn3• 3 years ago

A journalist here in Australia just named her baby "Methamphetamine Rules" because she assumed it would be rejected and was writing a story trying to find out what the default assigned name was. Only it wasn't rejected and she received a birth certificate with that name.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/19/can-y...

pests3• 3 years ago

Lovely, on record for life.

Turns out she got her answer to her original question via a phone call. Maybe she should have tried that route first.

Piraty• 3 years ago

https://xkcd.com/327/

tyingq5• 3 years ago

“We chose methamphetamine thinking there’s no way that anyone will see that word and think it’s OK,”

"Drysdale said she was under the impression that if a name was rejected by the registry, they choose one for you."

Surely this person is just some sort of attention seeker. Nobody is this dumb.

hiatus2• 3 years ago

It's ridiculous that the government could even reject a name in the first place.

RoyalHenOil2• 3 years ago

No joke, the mother of one of my friends changed her name to...just her first name. She eliminated her last name. This is also in Australia.

Not having a last name has caused her all kinds of problems. Australia may not officially require you to have a last name, but passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, utilities, etc., still require there to be something in that space. She kinda-sorta gets by using "[first name] [firstname]" or "[first name] NoLastName", but it is still a bureaucratic nightmare -- as I think anyone but her could have predicted.

ProllyInfamous• 3 years ago

My license plate is very similar to this, intended as a joke [I had to fight DMV for approval]. It has the additional advantage that no information about me pulls up when scanned/run through DMV records... intending to confuse [and often succeeding].

The occassional tow notice always elicits a chuckle — I no longer even respond to them. Citations/notices are few-and-far, as the authorities have made note to not use my lawful license plate as a default "no plate on vehicle" descriptor.

firefoxd• 3 years ago

Where is the donate button so we can keep the domain and website up forever?

Wish we could have saved nissan.com

internetter3• 3 years ago

This one?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070126133854/http://www.nissan...

blamazon2• 3 years ago

For anyone interested, here is the donate button[1] that saved Nissan.com for about 2 years.[2] It appears to still be open? Uzi Nissan was providing for his family, that inherited the domain after his death in 2020. [3] Understandably, they're doing what they have to do to get by. I personally wouldn't mind if they sold to Nissan, the car company, as long as they get a generationally life changing amount of money. The domain is still registered to Nissan Computer Corp. until 2029.

[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/Uzi-Nissan?

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950097

[3] https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-internet-domain-owner-who-fo...

madethemcry• 3 years ago

Great little story. Thanks!

NV is kind of a sentinel value to signal "not visible" and to differentiate it from actual plates isn't it? Only that it comes from external (the officer) and the systems involved are not aware of its special meaning which causes all the trouble.

Or how would you name this special value?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_value

poulsbohemian3• 3 years ago

I'm gearing up to make political and legal war on my local city government over the issue of parking. See it was one thing when they had a two-hour parking - it stinks, but at least it was published and everyone knew the rules. But, that wasn't punishing enough to citizens and they wanted to up their revenues. Or said another way, they got tired of chalking tires and decided to upgrade to geofencing technology. So now the deal is, a sensor on the parking enforcement vehicle reads your license plate and determines if you've been parked in the same block within a two hour time frame. The problem with this is, a) the only way you know about this is after you've been ticketed and are presented with the municipal code, b) the definition of "a block" is quite loose, and c) This means you could have moved your vehicle or left for 1 hour and 59 minutes, but if you are found to have even been in the same general area, they will ticket you. To make it even worse, they only enforce parking Monday-Friday, 8-5. So they are deliberately extorting local business people and avoiding upsetting the tourists who roll into town each weekend. Am livid not only at the city, but also at the state Attorney General's office for not being able to help me call out an absolutely extortionist city government.

472719942• 3 years ago

Bend, OR has this system (or did, a few years ago). I called up the phone number on the ticket and the guy was able to look up the photos and see that I had moved my car across the street and threw the ticket out for me without a hassle.

Dumb system, but they at least handled its failure pretty well.

poulsbohemian3• 3 years ago

That's the second half of my beef with the city - you can only fight these tickets on Thursday afternoons between 2-4 by going in to "traffic court." Bull crap.

latency-guy2• 3 years ago

Why is it on demand to review, but automated to bill? Seems like the brain rot extends to even the lowliest of lows.

m4632• 3 years ago

I got a ticket due to a poorly designed "smart" parking meter.

I parked and put change in the meter and it didn't seem to register. I was a little confused, and put it in the meter for the adjacent car and a coin would register and increment the time.

Ugh. So I put a post-it note on the windshield describing the problem and went to eat.

Came back, and you guessed it: post-it gone, replaced by parking ticket.

It wasn't obvious what was happening, and I kind of put it all together afterwards.

The parking meter seems to have some sort of occupancy sensor. I suspect it might reset your time to zero if you leave the spot. reading your comment, it might be a max time in spot sensor? who knows.

I think it needed my car to be detected to add time to the meter. Because it was too far away or not reflective, or whatever, the coins were not accepted to add time. But it did keep the quarters. geez.

I complained on the ticket when it came. Had to pre-pay, but went in and pled my case at the parking authority court. Took two witnesses. They filed something to talk to engineers and said they'd let me know.

And then they denied it. I had the ability to appeal, but by then it was several hours of my time taking off in the middle of the day and I just let them keep the $40.

jerks.

inferiorhuman5• 3 years ago

Depending on where you live it could be as simple as you're not allowed to park at a broken meter. It's possible but unlikely that there's any sort of occupancy sensor.

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/01/13/should-parking-be-allo...

FireBeyond• 3 years ago

And then they denied it.

Sounds like The Simpsons. Homer gets a parking ticket, with a number to call for an automated appeals process.

He calls.

"Thank you for appealing your parking ticket. Your appeal has been [no pause] Denied. Have a nice day. [click]"

brenns102• 3 years ago

Two hour parking (I'm guessing it's free, but it doesn't really matter) is the result of such a mind-numbingly obvious market inefficiency. Street parking is being given away for free, or at incredibly cheap prices, so of course demand is high and drivers visiting businesses can't find spots. So the city tries to disrupt demand by placing these artificial time limits, in the hope that it will allow visitors to park more easily. The obvious answer is to just charge market rate for street parking, and there will almost always be a few spots available. And anybody willing to pay market rate for 8 hours of street parking is welcome to.

To top it off, time limits are so stupid to enforce, as you say. It's easy to enforce meters, or paid parking with plates on a block. "If paid and not in red zone, ok, else, ticket." But instead cities have to come up with these "creative" (read: broken) systems for catching people who park too long.

edit: and same applies for weekends: charge market rate then too!

maccard2• 3 years ago

The obvious answer is to just charge market rate for street parking, and there will almost always be a few spots available

So only the rich can drive and park? FWIW, my city charges £6.70/hour for parking and it's still impossible to find a spot.

To top it off, time limits are so stupid to enforce, as you say. It's easy to enforce meters, or paid parking with plates on a block. "If paid and not in red zone, ok, else, ticket." But instead cities have to come up with these "creative" (read: broken) systems for catching people who park too long.

The limits on parking in many places are to encourage/force other means of transport for work.

inferiorhuman5• 3 years ago

  So they are deliberately extorting local business people

lol, no.

Free parking is a great example of tragedy of the commons. Without time limits people will abuse it. Case in point: California. A handicap tag out here will grant you an exemption to whatever time limits are posted regardless of whether or not the spot is reserved for handicapped drivers. What ends up happening is people with handicap tags will just take up all the spots all day, leaving nothing for anyone else.

   Or said another way, they got tired of chalking tires

Having worked in the smart parking meter industry I got to talk to city folks and, while it may be painful to hear the actual enforcement rate is pretty darn low with a few exceptions (typically time of day based ones like street cleaning and rush hour traffic). It's extremely labor intensive to monitor every spot, so enforcement is pretty haphazard.

  the definition of "a block" is quite loose

This is, in California, defined on a city by city basis as far as I can tell. San Francisco defines the minimum distance as 1/10 mile (or 1 block), Pismo Beach specifies 100 ft or 1/10 mile on the odometer. Both of which seem pretty specific.

pests3• 3 years ago

Those distance definitions of a block do not make any sense to me. Going from one street to the next is a block to me.

tragomaskhalos2• 3 years ago

Here in London targeted use of parking enforcement is an infamous money-spinner for local authorities - in instances where they know they can clean up: case in point, our local hospital has basically no on-site parking, only metered parking on local roads. The problem of course is that people going to a hospital appointment have no accurate idea how long the wait plus appointment time will be. Hence, there is a bloke on a scooter on permanent patrols looking for anyone who is a few minutes over so he can do them.

sokoloff2• 3 years ago

I wonder why 100 feet or 0.1 mile (528 feet) are alternatives.

philjohn• 3 years ago

I have a similar story - a local strip mall allows parking for 2 hours, no return within 4 hours.

They enforce this with ANPR cameras - only - sometimes you're inching out of the strip mall and bumper to bumper ... so it doesn't register you leaving.

Got a ticket, but luckily my Nest camera showed the time I returned, and the time I went back (needed something else) and they were more than 4 hours apart, and I'd only parked there for 20 minutes each time. Ticket was waived.

bombcar• 3 years ago

I am so glad I no longer live in areas where the parking enforcement is more strict than "we noticed that you have a burning tractor trailer on the street for the last month, need some help with it?"

easton• 3 years ago

no return within 4 hours.

must be a very popular strip mall if they are willing to say "visit us, but not too much!"

janandonly• 3 years ago

This event makes me smile and cry at the same time. We live in such a sick [computer says "no"] world "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts[1]"

[1] https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-the-final-spee...

NeoTar2• 3 years ago

I don't know if this would be practical, but a nice curtesy would be for the authorising agency to verify that there aren't any outstanding parking tickets against a newly registered plate, and to at least advise the purchaser, or refuse to issue the plate.

I can imagine human ingenuity is such that there are a huge number of possible 'bad', placeholder number plates used - in addition to the 'NV', 'NULL' and 'NO PLATE' listed in comments, imagine we could have 'NONE', 'NA' (i.e. N/A), 'BROKEN', 'ABSENT', etc.

tempestn• 3 years ago

Sounds like (well past) time to get a lawyer and sue the city for harassing you.

tyingq5• 3 years ago

This happens today with various state-hired contract firms that do ANPR reading of plates to automatically bill people for toll roads. They give zero shits about how accurate their readers are. So, someone with a plate of "3EE 432" gets a bill for a car with an actual plate of "8EE 432". And it's now on that person to solve the problem...which often involves a long wait on the phone, or complex website userid registration, etc.

I'm amazed there's not at least a system where you can quickly say "have a human verify this, this isn't me" via a text or button click.

internetter3• 3 years ago

Every incorrect reading should result in you recieving the cost of the ticket. If that was so, I would be 500$ richer. Would provide a nice incentive for contractors and governments to fix their shitty systems.

mabbo2• 3 years ago

Ontario built highway 407 in the early 2000s (late 90s?) with tolls that use license plate readers - no slowing down or stopping at all. Still a bit controversial, that, and especially controversial when the Conservative government sold it off to a private entity just to balance the budget for one year.

But in all that time, I literally do not know anyone who has gotten a bill from them for a bad plate read. We have blizzards here, torrential downpour rain, all kinds of weather that might make it hard. Still, nothing.

I wonder if the regulations on bad reads were simply made serious enough that the company handling it takes a very conservative approach to potential mistakes.

tyingq5• 3 years ago

I imagine some companies do it right. I know some don't. Maybe Canada has better laws around it than the US? Or more context...like you could probably do some amount of matching registered make/model to a plate/picture with sufficiently good software and trigger human intervention when matches are low confidence.

bluedino2• 3 years ago

I had a friend that would rack up a couple thousand in parking tickets every few years. We'd write funny notes on the tickets and mail them back to the courthouse, would have loved to been in that office.

It's easy to do. Go to the bar almost every day after work, and leave your car either on the street or in the city parking lots and come back and get it the next day. The late fees and penalties really add up!

The funny part is the local newspaper would do a story on the highest amounts owed for parking tickets and she was only ever in third or fourth place.

CalRobert5• 3 years ago

Why didn't they pay for parking?

bluedino2• 3 years ago

Parking was free it's just a fine to park over night

Eventually they boot your car and you have to go down and write a check

CalRobert5• 3 years ago

People interested in Parking might enjoy the High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup. https://www.shoupdogg.com/

Among other ideas he shares his view that there shouldn't even be "parking tickets", you just pay for the use of the land at the prevailing market rate.

xyzelement• 3 years ago

As a total aside, I started to notice that folks most vehement about cars/parking being bad have a pattern: white male, no family/kids, bicycle in the profile picture. Usually they are young and in Twitter, funny to see the pattern hold for this older professor (no evidence of family in bio/Wikipedia)

Seems like a correlation between this demographic and being a sort of male Karen that's really bothered about how other people get around.

Obviously urban planning is an important thing with tradeoffs to consider, I am just talking about the most vehement car haters.

gristig• 3 years ago

Only when I started biking did I realize how much space a bike took vs how much space a car took, how much resources and money was spent for bikes and how much for cars, how much negative externalities bikes cause vs how much cars cause. Many people I know tried to commute by bike but stopped because of how dangerous biking is (due to modern city planning). People like me who are young, single and male are more willing to take risks. So people like me continue to bike and continue to be annoyed by how much resources are given to cars vs bikes. If you want to see a diverse group of bikes, look at the Netherlands. There or is much safer to bike, so you will see more diversity. You'll see bikers who are old and young, male and female (not too many Indians, Chinese, Native Americans, or middle easterns, but that's more for geopolitical reasons).

CalRobert5• 3 years ago

I'm in my 40's and have two children. And I don't care how you get around, I just want to be able to bike places with my kids and not die. Cars (drivers, really) are the leading killers of children in the US, and I don't think being upset about that makes me a "Karen".

albrewer• 3 years ago

white male, no family/kids, bicycle in the profile picture. Usually they are young

My wife with 2 kids that has no twitter account also hates cars. You just don't hear from her because you don't go to the same places she does. The same probably goes for everyone else outside the demographic you're describing.

dkjaudyeqooe2• 3 years ago

Back in the 90's I moved to one side of Australia to the other, and to a different state, but I didn't change my drivers licence or car registration as required, because I figured the authorities had no way of catching me, and it was 10 times more expensive in my new state.

When I got a ticket nothing happened because the two state authorities didn't exchange information about car ownership for parking and traffic violations. I ran up probably $20,000 dollars worth of tickets pretty quickly, given I could park with impunity in a place where parking was impossible or super expensive (central Sydney). Also various speeding tickets.

Then I got a contract with the local driver licensing authority. My job: facilitate exchange of information between states for penalties associated with out of state plates.

I know what you're thinking: just filter out anything to do with my licence plates. But that would be unethical (cough). And I'd get caught.

As it happened, the first task was to apply it to trucks who were the worst offenders since they routinely travelled between states and there were obvious safety issues.

So I asked my boss about when the same would be done for out of state cars, "out of curiosity".

He said "20 years to never. It's too hard [for bureaucratic reasons]".

tokai• 3 years ago

I know what you're thinking: just filter out anything to do with my licence plates.

No not at all, I was thinking you sound like a selfish git.

chasing3• 3 years ago

I ran up probably $20,000 dollars worth of tickets pretty quickly, given I could park with impunity in a place where parking was impossible or super expensive (central Sydney). Also various speeding tickets.

Hey, man. Cool hack. I’m sure everyone appreciated the dangerous driving and parking in handicap spots and bus lanes and what-have-you…

TheHappyOddish2• 3 years ago

Or (as is implied in the stort), he simply didn't pay for parking around Sydney - very expensive - and the fines likely got interest and compounded.

Don't assume the worst in people.

photonerd• 3 years ago

I get the sense you’re proud of this story, and do not realize how negatively it paints you

iraqmtpizza3• 3 years ago

True. Anyone who takes a government job is morally low unless they're pulling some elite James O'Keefe-style exposé on corruption.

blamazon2• 3 years ago

Never say never: Where I'm from, in 2019 a truck driver killed seven motoryclists[1] while driving on what should have been a suspended license because of inter-state inefficiencies, which were quickly fixed after public outrage. They actually even sort of fixed it too much while clearing out the backlog. [2]

[1] https://www.masslive.com/news/2022/01/massachusetts-man-suin...

[2] https://www.nbcboston.com/investigations/the-mass-rmv-issued...

ballenf• 3 years ago

Really would love to see a state allow non-alphanumeric characters as part of plate. Just to watch the chaos when they travel out of state and get a ticket or parking infraction.

Would love to have a smiley or thumbs up character in my plate. Until I tried to pay for parking at a smart meter.

ticulatedspline• 3 years ago

I swear I've seen pictures with hearts, stars, smiley faces on plates. I thought it was California. though they might not be an actual integral part of the plate (real number is sans-wingdings)

PopAlongKid• 3 years ago

California has had this for decades. You can see the symbols allowed on the application form under "Kids plates" (the fees support child health and welfare programs in the state).

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/special-interest-license-...

ginkgotree• 3 years ago

My solution for dealing with the cluster f*%k that is the CA FTB, municipal parking tickets, etc, was to just leave California.

alexwasserman• 3 years ago

Reminds me of Irelands worst driver: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171....

Mr Prawo Jazdy has the most tickets in Ireland, because it means “Driving License” in Polish and cops just copied the wrong words off driving licenses.

100 Parking Tickets (2004)

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