Someone told me that you can help avoid getting a parking ticket at a time-expired parking meter by putting in a extra quarter BUT NOT turning the knob.
How does this help, you ask?
Well, according to what I heard, the parking police are required to turn the knob on the meter to ensure that it’s not broken or stuck or something before ticketting your car . Of course, when then turn it, the money is added to the meter and they can’t give you a ticket (at least for the 10 minutes more that the quarter buys you.) Sweet, huh?
Can anyone confirm or deny this? Are they really required to turn the knob?
If you look closely, some meters actually say “police will not turn handle” on them. The story has probably been around as long as the meters themselves.
I heard a variation where you only turn the handle part-way, so that the yellow flag becomes visible. Then, not only does the police officer add your coin when s/he turns the handle, but also the clock wouldn’t run with any previous coins while the yellow flag is up.
But yes, officers won’t turn the handle, they can write a ticket for just parking with the yellow flag visible, and digital meters don’t have handles anymore.
What’s the point? Why not just turn the handle yourself?
On an unrelated note, is straightdope.com run on a pack of Vic20s? I had to wait five minutes for this page to load. I know it’s NOT my connection, as every other page I’ve been to in this same session loads a lot faster. Is StraightDope sending me 10 billion cookies or what?
Pages you’ve been to already during this session will always be faster, because of the wonderful thing called a disk cache. Pages you view are stored as files to make recalling them faster. Before your browser contacts the network to view a page, it checks the cache to see if it’s saved.
As for the performance, the board is slow. It’s loaded down with several thousand simultaneous users. Plus, I think they finally pruned the old threads. I tried to find my first post today, but it’s gone.
But at least I can read the board today for a change. So I guess it worked.
Oh, and the point is that if you put in enough money to put the needle to the full time allowed (2 hours or whatever), then putting in another quarter won’t do you any good. It can’t register more than a certain amount of time.
Most meters, btw, are going the digital route, so there will shortly be no dial to turn. Relatedly, I’ve never seen a dial that could be turned “part-way” that would stay that way. All the ones (with dials) that I’ve seen have rather efficient springs involved, too.
