Parking services hell

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There should be a special place in hell reserved for people employed parking services. Sorry if you are, or your friend is, or your great aunt Tootie twice removed’s neighbor’s son’s roommate is. I’m sure you’re all good people, and that you don’t work at the place I’m talking about (my lovely University, whose prospective contribution to the alumni fund from me is slowly shrinking with each incident of petty shit like this). So while I’m sure there are many rock-solid logical reasons why this happened (irrespective of regulations, I’m talking logic here), I don’t see it.

I park my car at 1:46 on the nose today, paid by the automated parking service for 2 hours. That means parking expires at 3:46. Got it. Well, I get back to my car at 3:52 with a $25 citation. Remembering some past unpleasantness that I started on this board, yes, sure, I owe something because I got something for nothing for a whole 6 minutes. What I’m arguing is, I might as well have stayed there two, three, or more hours if I’m just going to pay $25 anyway. How does that deter people from parking violations? It’s as if stealing a pack of gum from a store and murdering someone were both life sentences. Sure, stealing from a store is wrong, but the law says, “Hey, that’s, wrong, but we’ll call it a misdemeanor because gum is cheap. Killing someone is also wrong, but it’s a lot more serious.”

How hard would the following be to implement: Divide up an hour into, say, 12 5-minute blocks. Make the fine $36 per hour (to make the math easy). That means each block is worth $3. So if someone is over by 6 minutes, like me, he/she would owe $3. Someone who is 45 minutes over would owe $27. In Statsman1982’s loopy world, that makes sense because someone lingering 45 minutes longer than they paid for is more of an inconvenience than someone staying 6 minutes over.

Of course, this ignores what the real purpose of the traffic and parking organization in campus (who by the way, are only in charge of parking and nothing else): revenue generation. It’s a money-making scheme, pure and simple. Maybe regulations have a few benefits, but they mostly seem to just be after easy money (it’s much easier to pay the fine and bitch–hey, like I’m going to do–than fight city hall).

If I had the balls (and the time), I’d pay them in pennies.

2

HA! This is awesome! This is a username/post combination that is too mundane, and too pointless for anyone to comment on even for Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share. It’s even more mundane than the “Chili’s Ruined My Bacon” thread, or the one about all the extra stuff in someone’s fridge, apparently. Wow! And I really wasn’t even shooting for this.

Now I suppose someone will come along and ruin my accomplishment by commenting, probably something like “What were you looking for, you idiot? Of course you pay the fine and be happy about it. No one has ever been in your situation or has ever wanted to gripe about it. You’re crazy/stupid/a loser/wasting my time/etc…”

3

I’m almost scared to post! But, I’ve gotten a few parking tickets on my campus. Every time, I have whined to the powers that be and had them waived.

I hate parking tickets. Especially since I’m paying who knows how much to park a quarter mile from my office.

4

BetsQ, I can be a very odd person at times to say the least. I was truly surprised that no one had commented before I bumped my own thread. It seems that people on this board will comment on anything. While the topic was by far not the best, I thought it was far from being the most pointless one I’ve seen.

5

Seems to me a person who’s over by 6 minutes would owe $6: $3 for the first 5-minute block and $3 for the partial second block.

Here’s a question: Suppose the evil parking services people (EPSP) come around and ding you when you’re over by 6 minutes. Boom, $6 parking ticket. The ticket sits there for another 39 minutes until you show up 45 minutes after your time expired. Didn’t you just get a free pass on the extra fine? Or do you expect the EPSP to sweep all the lots every 5 minutes to keep their fines up to date?

But wait, you said it’s automated. How do they actually issue the ticket? Is it a piece of paper under your wipers, or something electronic? And how do they know when you actually return to your car and vacate the space?

I know you’re not going to like my crazy-ass idea of just getting back to your car before 3:46 (since you already know exactly when your time is up) and avoiding the fine altogether. Now that sounds like easy money.

6

If it were me, I probably would have gone back and spent a couple more hours in the library or something. I mean, you’ve got the fine already, right? That seems to be the flaw in the “lets be hardasses” style of parking management.

7

FTR you don’t need the time. If you go to the bank and ask for a box of pennies, it’s conveniently $25.

8

Here in Calgary, parking downtown was more expensive than the parking tickets for expired meters - I’m sure you can imagine how long it took people to figure that out and take advantage of it (and how long it took the City to realize people were doing this and jack up the parking fines). I hate parking tickets too, but I realize that it’s an effort to discourage people from driving to downtown and increasing traffic congestion so I don’t drive there.

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah - six minutes over is not on time. I’ve watched meter people here stand and wait for the meter to click over into “expired” so they could write a ticket. A good way to avoid it is to get back to your car on time. :slight_smile:

9

Yeah, but this is at at a university, not the “real world” that Real-Worldians love to tout as being superior to academia. You know, where things like First Summer, Second Summer, Fall, and Spring are actually meaningful demarcations of time. Where professors (even assistant professors) can just decide to cancel class one day, no problem. Where there are things like Free Speech circles, and Dead Day, and free cookies at meetings (aka, colloquia). Where I have access to thousands of dollars worth of sophisticated business software for next to nothing (because I’m a funded PhD student!). It seems that the University loves to inject reality into the weirdest places.:):cool:

Oh, and I don’t have any more love for the Canadian parking nazis you describe either. Waiting for a meter to expire and then writing a ticket is by definition a dick move. Yeah, okay, technically you are occupying space that someone else could use. But technically, we’re all a lot of things. We have a word on this board for people who get bogged down in technicalities–pedants.

(Disclosure: I don’t have any firsthand experience with Big City Parking authorities. The largest city I’ve ever lived in has been 250,000 people or so, and it’s in a spread-out town with almost 0 parking meters. Parking is not a problem).

More seriously, **Scarlett67, **it is an automated payment system, but they still send out people to physically put tickets on windshields. Which makes it even more dumb. I go to one of the physically largest universities in the country, if I’m not mistaken (1,839 acres). We have lots of parking, actually. In the summertime, demand is very low (the facility I was in today was about 60% empty) because summer enrollment is always lower than regular semester enrollment. We also have lots of people who commute to campus, so when they’re done with classes, they get in their cars and drive home. They’re not there all day taking up space.

Here’s my thought: The Traffic and Parking Department on my campus was needed when it was smaller than it is now. It’s large, and keeps growing, but no one wants to get rid of Traffic and Parking, so it seeks out ways to justify and pay for its existence. One way to pay for it is to create an artificial sense of scarcity when it comes to parking, and then charge a premium for it. It makes perfect sense, really. I can’t fault them for wanting to take care of their own.

It would be easy, theoretically, to test. Just don’t have T&P operate on a few selected days out of the summer and observe what happens. I’m sure I could come up with a rigorous study given time and inclination, but I have a feeling IRB would find a way to quash it.

10

I tell you what, man. One year in grad school in early December I got a letter from the bursar’s office that, by the way, since they’d screwed up processing my tuition check in August I owed them that amount plus a fee for every single day (including weekends) that I hadn’t rectified the situation. The situation I knew nothing about. To add insult to injury, I got the letter late on a Friday. (I did eventually get it straightened out after the ole “have a lawyer send a letter on letterhead” trick.)

So it took them, what, six months to figure out they didn’t think I paid my tuition? Park that fucking car ONE SECOND too long and see how on the ball those sons of bitches were. For a while I paid almost two hundred dollars a semester for the CHANCE to park. Not a space, just the idea of a space.

11

Yeah, I guess that wouldn’t work. As I said, I don’t really have much experience with traffic and paring people. Although, with the frequency that these guys hand out tickets, I would be honestly surprised if they didn’t sweep every half hour at least. So maybe do it in half-hour increments.

But is it literally impossible and impractical to have some kind of automated system that could prorate a fine rather than assess $20 for one, two, …, 10 hours or whenever they decide to come back? Hell, I’ll be able to play 3D games without glasses on Nintendo DS soon, so there might be some way to do better.

12

Well, you might or might not know my feelings on what should have happened in your situation (hint: the university fucking eats it, and gets a better billing system next time–their fault, their problem). I’m sorry for your experience. It seems sometimes as if they are doing their level best to ensure that their alumni contributions are lower than they need to be.

I honestly have seen people write letters to our school newspaper about our parking situation. Professors have railed against it. Students who have transferred in swear its worse here. I can’t speak to that, of course.

I’m going to pay like a good boy because I technically broke the rules. It was my fault, not anyone else’s. All’s I’m saying is, it seems weird that there is no possible way to enact a system that gave people graduated parking fines, more money for longer time.

13

I prefer the systems where I swipe my credit card on the way in and pay on the way out. I don’t have to guess how long I’m going to be and I pay for the spot for exactly the time I’m using it. Perhaps you should have someone submit an anonymous proposal to the school showing that they wouldn’t need any parking enforcement if they changed to this system.

14

Long ago I worked as an “automobile location technician” (my phrase.) First thing I learn was to turn off my brain when people started ranting about price and time. 99% of the time they would wind down after a minute or two, pay up and stalk off. 1% they would just stalk off and we would write it off.

The whole system is designed to use as few people as possible. If they have zero people enforcing the parking then nobody would ever pay. If they had someone there all the time (as in a normal attendant parking lot) they have to pay one person per lot. My guess is that you have a number of lots and they have one person to patrol them. They only catch some of the people who’s time has run out. So those few, a sample, have to pay the price for all the others who got away. You made a bet, with pretty good odds too, and lost.

15

When I was in college, I had a parking ticket budget. Some days I knew I’d be late and would have to park illegally to get to class on time, and just pay the fee.

They also had a rule that your first ticket for each calendar year would be waived. This was based on your license plate number. So, I would borrow each of my parents cars and my brother’s car once a year and get to park wrong 4 times. Huzzah!

I don’t think college parking tickets are to discourage people from parking too long or parking in the wrong spots so much as they are a little bit of revenue for the school. If you want to park like a professor or a grad student parks, you gotta pay a premium :slight_smile: (By that I mean if you want to park in a lot designated for profs or grad students, not that those folks park illegally for sport)