You’d think that the owners of the lots would appoint a guy to, you know, walk around the lot with records and see if there are any cars that have been there for over x amount of time. x = a year seems a good starting point.
Until the lot is filling completely with some regularity, the presence of any number of abandoned cars costs the owners exactly zero. It’s only when abandoned cars (whose parking tab presumably will never get paid) begin causing the lot to turn away would-be paying ordinary customers that it begins to bite them.
Another thought:
Suppose the law in that state is that vehicles can’t be declared abandoned until a year has passed. The lot’s management may well have known for 10 months now that that car was probably abandoned after it had been sitting 1 whole month. But they can’t do anything about it until next month: that’s the first date when they can file to seize it as abandoned and then sell it to recoup their fees. From the outside observer’s POV, a car where the lot’s management is waiting on the law looks exactly like a car that management is oblivious to.
Further, assuming lot management can seize then sell these abandoned cars in a simple & cheap legal process, that means an abandoned decent saleable car is just as good as a paying customer’s car. Better even since that space is guaranteed filled for an entire e.g. year with no chance of it being vacant a single night and no cost of multiple credit card transactions, wear and tear on the entrance and exit gates, etc. An absent or dead customer is the ideal trouble-free customer. Assuming the abandoned car can pay their bill when it comes due.
The airport terminal parking structure where I used park at work costs $25/day now. A year there would cost $9,125. If we assume a 5% auction house fee to sell the car and a law firm charging $500 to handle the routine paperwork to support the seizure, any car that can be sold for more than roughly $10.2K is a moneymaker for the lot just by leaving it sit there. They’d be motivated to haul off unsaleable clunkers sooner, but again only if their lot regularly fills up and the clunker means they’re turning away paying customers.
Here’s a thread from a couple months ago on the general question of taking legal ownership of abandoned cars. It has some useful info from folks with actual practical experience.
This time, Sauron has gone too far!
I think it’s common for most lots to allow cars to be parked for 30 days. If they are going to be there longer, they want you to set that up ahead of time. I don’t think that they’ll always tow after 30 days. It’s more that they have the option to tow if they want to. If they don’t need the spot, then having the car sit is probably fine. No sense towing early and then having to deal with an irate customer who comes back after a long trip to find their car has been sold off.
Back to morbidity. Wondering if there’s a business opportunity here; not just after disasters, but searching for/identifying unmoved dust covered cars in any major parking structure. Might beat walking the beach with a metal detector? If you find one or a few, especially with a backstory - The Great American Novel.
Yes, I’m bored and stuck inside reading the Dope on a sweltering Sunday afternoon.
Or the makings of a Hallmark holiday movie.
Flight goes down due to whatever. 6 months later 2 of the surviving spouses meet in the office of the Airport Administration trying to claim their respective cars. It takes forever and they go to lunch while waiting. One thing leads to another and we have our movie.
Not a “Meet Cute” by any means, but it could work!
Sauron meets Gary Larson
I suppose the same could be asked about anything. What happens to the late unfortunate passenger’s house. I suppose after a year or two the city might come and take it for unpaid taxes, assuming the bank balance and automatic withdrawal doesn’t take care of that for a while. What happens when someone is arrested and not bailed out - their car is impounded and sits in the impound for how long before someone can sell it? Or has to be held for evidence in a trial, then an appeal that results in a retrial, and meanwhile this vehicle is evidence for a seven or ten year legal saga?
I can think of a number of situations where property is abandoned or neglected for extended times.
(There was a news report years ago about some fancy British lord who disappeared for over a year, until he was found in one of the dozens of rooms in his mansion, sitting where he’d died of a heart attack and nobody noticed. Other people lived in the house, but… it was big)
So the answer to the OP is - either they have a process to check for abandoned cars, or someone happens to notice (dust buildup?) or it sits there until someone does notice. Whether they have a process depends how badly the lot owner cares, and whether it’s a common problem.
They at least used to check the short term lot when my friend had the genius idea to pull one over on them way back in the day.
He needed to park for two weeks and saw that lost tickets were charged $8. He figured that instead of paying $50 to park in the boonies, he’d park the whole time right next to the entrance and claim a lost ticket. Yeah, no. They kept track of that shit and had a clipboard with a list. Try $300. He reparked and told them that he’d have to hit the ATM.
He won in the end. He gave me a call and I drove to the airport and parked in short term and gave him my ticket and he paid fifty cents. Then I claimed that I lost my ticket. Oh man the smug look on the guys face that dropped when he tried and failed to find my license plate on the clip board.
Were we wrong? For sure. But we were young and clever.