Court Says Using Chalk on Tires for Parking Enforcement Violates Constitution | Hacker News Reader

Court Says Using Chalk on Tires for Parking Enforcement Violates Constitution

npr.org

336 pointscodezero464 comments

I suppose I'm happy that the fourth amendment was upheld, but from a privacy perspective I'm disheartened.

A chalked tire was ephemeral. I doubt that whatever replaces it will be.

Many cities have vehicles that are covered with cameras, read your license plate, and make a database entry.

And chalk on tires is unconstitutional?

I guess you're thinking of privacy while the court was thinking of trespass in terms of property and property damage. The chalk affects the tire, so property damage. The camera doesn't affect the tire, so no property damage. Both affect privacy: the chalk mark signifies that you parked somewhere where they mark tires and the camera records that you were in some spot.

For what it's worth: Palo Alto already tracks parking electronically. The good part of this is that you can't just repark in a different space to avoid a ticket; this encourages people to have a real plan for the entire time they need parking.

Perhaps the US government or the states should enact data retention laws to ensure stuff gets purged in order to avoid the downsides of a surveillance state.

This stuff can be a pain though. I drop my daughter off at a club on Saturday mornings. I need to pay for parking for an hour, even though I only need 10 minutes but then I can’t return for 2 hours. So actually, I need to pay for 2 hours upfront so I can come back to collect later.

You're in the minority where it affects you negatively.

The main purpose of street front parking meters, aside from revenue, is to encourage people to get in and get out. Parking is a limited resource designed to support local businesses, whose revenue scales with the number of visits, not their duration.

The idea that parking exists primarily to increase the revenue of business owners seems pretty bleak.

It’s not like parking is this beautiful stuff you’d like to have around, eh? Of course parking serves the purpose of whatever it’s next to.

What other function would it serve in a retail area? I suppose you could argue that its direct purpose is to allow people who do not live within walking distance to visit and spend time. But unless local businesses profit from that visiting, they're not going to be in business for long and there won't be any reason for people to go there.

30 years ago we could say the purpose is simply to "exist in the public space of my community", but the demand for constantly increasing revenue from any and all space has effectively destroyed that.

You’re joking right? We’ve never had parking just because. It’s always been there to serve the needs of whatever it’s next to. In the case of retail, it’s to support the shops, period.

We’ve had mechanically metered parking since the 1940s, and manually paid for parking before that. Something has to pay for all that concrete.

This assumes that the purpose of a visit is retail shopping, which is in decline. Downtown use is shifting towards experiences (restaurants, coffee shops, etc) where lingering a while is an essential feature.

The statement you are responding to does not assume the purpose of a visit is retail shopping. It doesn't matter what kind of business it is, it needs to make sufficient revenue, and unless the businesses start charging for lingering, they need to ensure enough customers are able to patronize the business to keep it going.

The point is a quantity over quality thing. People that linger/feel free to take their time are more likely to spend more in a lot of business classes. Optimizing for quantity of people spending money may be suboptimal for total revenue if each individual person spends less because they feel time pressured / aren't allowed to "window shop" / etc.

Quality over quantity is a nice theory, but a bad idea when allocating public spending.

I'm not sure I even understand what your point is now.

Public spending tries to account for quality all the time. Quality "metrics" of various sorts exist in lots of places and can always be evaluated (or found, then evaluated, as may often need to be the case) when making trade-offs.

In the case of public parking, there are ways to improve "quality" by reducing overall parking pressure at specific locations by "moving" it to other areas, such as park-and-ride combinations with public transportation, improving access to site-to-site ground transportation (bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, segways, what have you), and just improved public transportation in general.

Quantity is often an easier metric to optimize for because it's always a number, but that's all the more reason for public spending to find ways to do the hard thing and optimize for quality. That's why we elect people to work on hard problems and care so much about public spending.

Define quality. It's all great to say that quality matters, but you're using an abstract definition of quality while letting everyone fill in their own mental definition of quality. That feels good, but is is a terrible way to actually make the concrete decisions about how the public purse will be used.

There was nothing abstract in my definition of quality. I defined quality directly in terms of things that matter to net revenue of local businesses several times in the above posts and gave several examples (such as perceived time pressure versus ability to window shop or impulse buy).

I don't see how that is a terrible way to make concrete decisions about public spending, and I'm very not sure why you are arguing that it is. Quality can certainly be defined and optimized for, and that's precisely what I've said, and provided specific examples for. I even admitted that optimizing for quality is hard, but just because something is hard doesn't make it impossible to make concrete decisions about.

So you’re not optimizing for quality, you’re optimizing for revenue, and you just disagree with my recommendations for optimization. Got it.

The point of going to a restaurant or coffee shop is the atmosphere / venue for socialization; you would not do it if too tight a timeline were imposed.

... which is why they usually pay for their own lots and don't use publicly funded metered parking.

Not at a lot of places I go to. I guess a place like Starbucks or McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts almost always (not always!) has a lot, but random restaurants and coffee shops that I go to generally don't.

Even this idea of optimizing for visits over duration is flawed for retail shopping: not everyone has a specific item in mind and only that specific item in mind for a direct in/out purchase decision. So much of marketing is about impulse buys, and so much of consumer decision models are about wrestling with a wall of near but distinct variations of a product for that "perfect" one for a particular shopping. That's before you even get into the social models of retail where people shop together. Retail shopping benefits financially from time/lingering/"experiences" just as well as everything else and optimizing for "visits" maybe optimizing for the wrong things for even retail.

Arguably this is exactly part of why retail disappeared from many urban environments because suburban and exurban Malls were better at optimizing for lingering, social experiences in the 70s/80s.

> The main purpose of street front parking meters, aside from revenue, is to encourage people to get in and get out

That's not a purpose aside from revenue, that's a mechanism for increasing sales, property, and/or income tax revenue, depending on the particular tax regime in the locality.

If you want a walkable downtown, you need to keep the stores alive, which means they need revenue. Especially true in a place like Palo Alto with its crazy rent prices.

IF you want a walkable downtown you need people to have a reason to walk. Once someone is in their car it isn't a big deal to get back in my car to drive to the next place - you see this all the time in strip malls where people drive to the next store. Keeping people from getting into the car in the first place is key. That means you need to focus downtown first on the people who live there. Outsiders who don't live downtown are welcome to come too, but if you make their needs the focus you kill downtown.

Car shoppers are the least valuable shoppers by far. They spend less and they demand more public spending in their support.

You can downvote all you want, but it's been researched.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/12/cyclists-and-...

https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/study-shows-people-w...

https://www.bishopstonsociety.org.uk/bishopston/amenities/11...

"Car shoppers are the least valuable shoppers by far. They spend less"

Hmm...sounds like a good justification for owning a car - I can't give it up, otherwise I would spend too much on other stuff!

I won't disagree with your ideas in general because I just don't know.

But in the case of Palo Alto, this isn't true. Parking is just hard enough to find that people generally do walk once parked. And there aren't enough people in downtown to keep it alive without the outsiders.

I've never been to Palo Alto, but I'm going to guess that it is another town that goes to bed early. Busy during business hours and sporting events (and other large venus that bring in people), dead otherwise. People already downtown for work stay downtown for lunch, but they do all their non-lunch activities elsewhere if possible. (using the court house is only possible downtown...)

Palo Alto is a town where Millionaires complain about being treated like undesirables, because they don't make as much money as the vast numbers of people who have hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions.

And so the "just millionaires" become the new downtrodden and homeless. At least, in their own minds.

You wanna talk about "Reality Distortion Effect"?

There's a lot of places like you describe :-)

Palo Alto is oddly not one of them. I don't know why PA is so unusual, but it is. Might be the safety. Might be the disposable income. Might be the lack of mainstream-style shopping and dining areas.

You might not need to pay for parking because you might not be parking per se. The california definition of parking:

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...

>“Park or parking” shall mean the standing of a vehicle, whether occupied or not, otherwise than temporarily for the purpose of and while actually engaged in loading or unloading merchandise or passengers.

As long as you're physically engaged in loading or unloading merchandise or passengers, your car is standing but not parking. If you only need to drop off your child and don't need to escort her inside, you shouldn't be forced to pay for parking.

> The good part of this is that you can't just repark in a different space to avoid a ticket

This is weird to me. Is parking time a per day thing instead of per instance - e.g. if I park for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, would it violate a 3-hour parking space? If not, what's the criteria for being "not parked", if getting in and driving your vehicle to another spot isn't it - would around the block count?

Palo Alto uses a clearly marked zone system. So the two hours per day is per zone.

Huh. I guess that makes sense, it's just quite unfamiliar to me.

In my city it is per block face. So you can go around the corner and park again. Except that you can't because we have no meters so all the parking is full all the time.

> Is parking time a per day thing instead of per instance - e.g.

In many cities, it's a certain time limit in a certain geographic zone within a particular time window (e.g., 1 hour in a 2 hour window in a set of adhat blocks) that either hits a hard limit or (where tiered pricing is used) a higher price/time tier.

Palo Alto’s system is very successful at keeping me out of Palo Alto, and I think that’s actually the point. There’s nothing I can think of that in Palo Alto that’s worth dealing with their parking situation.

Given this ruling, the 2012 ruling about GPS trackers, and the ubiquity of number plate scanners, it’s possible someone could challenge the constitutionality of requiring license plates on vehicles — they’re not all black model Ts anymore, so there’s less need for the registration number to be visible a mile away.

If it goes that route, even the legality of using of drug sniffing dogs comes into question.

I'd imagine drug dogs sniffing you while you walk down a public street to be unconstitutional. At airports, concert venues, and so on, it seems like you've already consented to being searched.

They should be unconstitutional.

According to whom?

If the state hasn't shown that an accused has committed a crime before the state trespassed but needs to trespass first to then dig up an ex-post justification for trespassing witch hunts develop.

And yet, the supreme court has upheld the use of drug sniffing dogs for traffic stops.

And yet, their accuracy is poor to say the least and no objective, informed, reasonable person would conclude that a drug dog scratching someone's paint would be considered probable cause. But here we are.

The rationale is probably that smelling the air around a car is not trespass.

Drug sniffing dogs aren't accurate. You might as well allow the cop to flip a coin and if it comes up heads he has probable cause to search the vehicle. Combine that with civil asset forfeiture laws and you have a nasty incentive. Cops have been caught giving their dogs signals to bark so they can seize the car.

If the dog had a collar that sprayed you with chalk to indicate you’d been sniffed...

Both the GPS and the chalking cases involved a government officer committing a physical trespass. Requiring you to affix a registration plate isn't remotely similar. So, while there might be a challenge available, the GPS and chalking cases don't really pace the way for it in any substantive new way.

So all they'd need to do is compel the driver to chalk his own car?

They already require you to affix a sticker inside the window in many places. That's the same thing.

Or to buy a 2-hour parking license for your license plate online.

You could just require a permit to park, and permits are issued by a ticket machine, and are valid for 2 hours (or whatever). Cars without prominently displayed tickets are fined, and cars with expired tickets also.

Without the physical intrusion, I don't think this ruling would apply at all.

> So all they'd need to do is compel the driver to chalk his own car?

The typical method along those lines is paying at a machine, getting a receipt, and posting the receipt visibly inside the windshield or the street side window, but, yes. This was about physical trespass for information without sufficient cause, not a right not to have parking time tracked.

Is looking in a window not itself a 'search'? Like, a police officer dragging a street by looking in every window for pot or guns would presumably be indiscriminately searching without probably cause, why would it be different with tickets in windows legally?

My experience though is this particular style of parking pass is usually on private property where the people checking are not part of a branch of police though, and thus I think are not bound against unreasonable search in the same way?

I know for searches you need to have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the search to be illegal.

For example, I saw an article a few years ago where a cop was literally walking a drug dog around a house. The dog detected drugs so they busted the door down. The courts threw the case out, there was no reason for a drug dog to be searching around his house.

I’d expect if you had a drugs or a dead body in plain view of a window then your expectation of privacy is gone.

> Is looking in a window not itself a 'search'?

No, by the plain view doctrine information gathered at least by normal human senses without a physical trespass is not a search.

> Like, a police officer dragging a street by looking in every window for pot or guns would presumably be indiscriminately searching without probably cause

No, they wouldn't, just like a police officer indiscriminately looking through your car window for violations of cellphone use while driving laws without any particular cause isn't.

Fair enough. Today I learned.

In a sense, yes. The argument would be that they're not really compelling you, because you don't need to park there. The city is allowed to make all kinds of crazy rules about who may park where and when on public roads.

In another sense, no, because what the chalk does is establish that this car has not moved since the last time the officer went by. If you chalk the tire yourself, the officer cannot know when you did so.

I’m not a lawyer, so this is just idle speculation, but the relationships I see are:

* Like the GPS trackers, license plates are devices designed to aid in identifying and locating a vehicle from a distance by technological means.

* Like the chalk marks, the government is using these devices indiscriminately, without probable cause.

* For bonus points, license plates are compelled speech, like requiring you to introduce yourself with your real name to everyone you meet.

It’S certainly not a guaranteed win, but it’s not so far fetched that I’d be surprised to see a competent lawyer try it.

Driving is a privilege, not a right. You can drive without license plates on private property all you want.

Not everything is binary. Driving is a privilege, yes, but making use of the privilege does not imply forfeiture of civil rights. A balance has to be struck.

And many, many people are perfectly ok with the balance of "if you want to drive on public roads, you have to display a somewhat-opaque identifier on your vehicle so you can be held accountable if you screw up".

As people point out, the opacity has lessened over time, and it's reasonable to question if we should re-evaluate how it's being used. Kind of like how social security numbers have changed their role in society.

License plates not being required will lead to abuse of driving privileges, an imbalance.

Being required to identify yourself and related property in relation to suspected crimes (with probable cause) is acceptable. E.G. "License and Registration please, you are suspected of committing X and possibly other crimes."

Being required to wear a real-name badge in a public place is much more unsettling.

In a great many cities, this right is actually restricted. City codes often prohibit parking unregistered/expired vehicles on private property if they're visible.

Yeah... that's to prevent blight, having a neighbor who has a de facto junk yard in their front yard is really bad for property values.

If your unregistered car is not in disrepair and you aren't storing multiple cars in your front yard, you're very unlikely to be cited.

I just looked up my town ordinance and it only applies to "junk motor vehicles."

> I just looked up my town ordinance and it only applies to "junk motor vehicles."

And just exactly who determines this "junk" status?

Humans, naturally. Usually a subclass of humans we call "judges" whose job it is to decide on these matters.

Snark aside, law isn't code and the "reasonable person" test works well in most cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

We have bylaw officers in my town. They would be the ones to decide what a junk vehicle is and obviously they are not experts in every area possible so they just use their judgement and make a call. Some other person who applied for a job in my city that my taxes pay gets to determine if my stuff is crap or not. Of course you can always take the city to court if they are acting inappropriately. What criteria do they use? I am going to guess the does the car look like crap test. If so get ride of it. Or how about when did you insure or drive the car last? Not for years well get rid of it. The fact of the matter is, like others have said, no one wants a neighbor that collects a bunch of cars that just rot and look like crap. No one is asking people to get working vehicles and get rid of them. Also, the city gives you plenty of warning. You could show them look the car drives or your intent to fix it. No different then if they determine your yard isn't clean enought....I personally like long grass and bugs, the city not so much. Some person gets to decide is the answer.

In my county junk is defined as incapable of moving under it's own power.

That plus a leeway of 1 week is a fairly objective standard.

I believe in my city a car parked on the streets has to be moved at least once every three days.

To put that another way, middle-class and wealthy people don't like to see poor people.

The way most places I'm aware of structure it is vehicles that don't have current registration or that can't move under their own power. That's potentially more broad than "junk" but also a more objective standard.

This sort of law can have a severe impact on poor people. Imagine you're barely getting by, then your car breaks down. This is not unlikely because as you're barely getting by, you have an older car and you're not having it maintained professionally on a rigorous schedule. It's going to be a while before you can afford the parts - let's say a "new" transmission from a junkyard. It sure would help if you didn't have to pay $100/month to keep insurance on it though. Of course, that means you have to turn in the license plate, or they'll suspend your driver's license (in certain jurisdictions).

A lot of people have to sell their car for scrap in this situation, which does not give them anywhere near enough to replace it with something reliable.

FWIW, that is not exactly true (in the US). Driving is not an explicitly enumerated right, but it cannot be taken away without due process, so it's more than a privilege.

>Driving is a privilege, not a right.

Given it's impact on day to day life, perhaps it is time to change that.

Law does work by similarity, but to the features cited in the decision rationale (here and in the GPS case, physical trespass without probable cause), not similarities unrelated to the decision rationale.

Sorry, is it a requirement to introduce oneself with his real name to everyone they meet?

> * For bonus points, license plates are compelled speech, like requiring you to introduce yourself with your real name to everyone you meet.

That's why I won't get a amateur radio plate any more. Anybody can look up my callsign and figure out who I am. And I'm legally required to show it.

At least a license plate has some obfuscation between plate# and human who registered it.

> Like the GPS trackers, license plates are devices designed to aid in identifying and locating a vehicle from a distance by technological means.

License plates originated in the early 1900s, long before color film cameras were a thing, and more than a century before inexpensive, at-scale license plate readers were a thing.

License plates were devices designed to aid police officers in identifying a vehicle from up close by requesting a license plate check.

It was remarkable in 2002's Bourne Identity when the highly-trained agent remarked that he knew the license plate numbers of every vehicle in the lot, and the implication that he'd recall them if they happened across the same cars again was scary.

The fact that it costs almost nothing to outfit every meter reader with a license plate scanner and log the motion of people and cars in a central database is an accident caused by the progress of technology, not a design goal of the license plate.

Preventing abuse of technologies as they become possible is a hard problem.

> is an accident caused by the progress of technology, not a design goal of the license plate

It certainly wasn’t a design goal for 1910-era license plates, but it probably is for 2010-era license plates. The only way to really know would be to subpoena the records relating to the most recent redesign process.

It's practically required to carry a transponder in your car on the east coast as there are many toll roads and they are in the process of phasing out cash.

There are companies that want to turn your cell phone into that transponder so that you can just use your phone as a universal transponder.

This seems likely to happen. Once it does, will having a smart phone with this feature enabled be required to drive on a road? If so, it is seems likely that this requirement will be challenged in court, but what's the difference between being required to have a plate on your car or an app on your phone?

Oh good, even less chance to catch hit and runs. Removing license plates would mean a field day for criminals all to appease a few tinfoil hat wearers.

Imagine having to plate and infringe upon 300+ million people just to appease some hit-and-run foil pants wearers

Tinfoil amplifies signals.

That, and "conspiracy theorist", are propaganda terms, and should be rejected.

If you have the correct vitamin supplements you can dampen your output.

Yeah, no. /r/conspiracy has a 1000 comment thread that witchhunts people at my friend's company because it shared an address in SF with some dating site loosely related to Hillary Clinton. People I cared about were literally threatened with their lives.

Everybody that reads about conspiracies, or discusses conspiracy theory, must be just like those people.

...wow.

Criminals already just use stolen cars and/or stolen plates.

I doubt most hit-and-runs are committed in stolen cars.

> all to appease a few tinfoil hat wearers.

Straw manning does not make your position look stronger. Privacy is a valid concern.

Your comments in this thread broke the site guidelines. Could you please review and follow them when posting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Note, in particular, "Don't be snarky" and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Also the one against calling names (such as "tinfoil hat wearers").

Understood regarding name calling, but the other guy literally cited a wikipedia article on Nazi Concentration Camps to corroborate what he was talking about. How did I in that case did I respond to a "weaker interpretation that was easier to criticize"?

Mountain View, CA is already using automated roving photo technology to enforce the 72 hour parking limitation (anti-RV living). Personally I have a coherent position on data retention that could apply to any DB like this and make it ephemeral. Legislation about data retention with room for lossy aggregates like counts.

What do you think the chances are that some city IT department screws that up?

In Beverly Hills, a shocking percentage of people drive without license plates. Most are dealer advertisement plates. The cops rarely pull people over for this.

I like the idea of reverse regulations. Like I shouldn’t have to display my license plate unless I’ve been cited as a dangerous driver.

Ohio does similar to this with "party plates".

This only became illegal on January 1, 2019. Before that there was a grace period. So you're going to see a lot less of it.

This is actually how Steve Jobs got away with not having a license plate. He just got a new car every 5-6 months (the grace period is 6 months)

What would stop someone from doing crimes if all car were anonymous?

The same thing that stopped people 50-100 years ago.

Actual police work.

You would replace photo radars, red light cameras and automatic paying tolls with actual employees? That sound like a waste of manpower.

Does that also mean that petrol is now free since you could just fill up and drive away without ever being recognized? Or are we also putting someone at each pump to make sure nobody drives away?

This would also make actual police investigation harder. How would you call the police on someone driving recklessly without being able to provide the plate? What about when they need to find someone that has a done a crime? Should they close down traffic and search every single cars of the same color and make as the criminal's?

The only way removing plates would work is if you replace it with something more invasive (i.e. facial recognition).

In short, you could do any crimes you currently do with a stolen car or fake plates without any effort.

Re petrol, you could do what's done everywhere in Canada as far as I know, which is simply have people pay at the pump before filling. (And yes, it works for filling the tank too, since you can authorize a larger amount than is spent.)

I can't talk about all of Canada but I know that those pump before paying stations are still quite common in the eastern provinces during daytime hours.

Ah, ok, I think the furthest east I've pumped gas is Quebec, but most of my knowledge comes from BC, Alberta and Ontario.

Anyway, pre-paying for gas is a thing that's pretty straightforward, is my main point.

It's strange, now that I think of it, to consider that getting gas before paying has died out in a lot of places, such as where I live, but getting (and consuming) food before paying has not.

Along with the social norm, there's probably a financial incentive behind that. If you make people pre-pay, they're much less likely to stick around and spend more. But obviously the norm is huge too; you'd be associated with fast food.

I think all gas stations in the areas I frequent in the US (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia) are prepay only. I haven't seen a gas station that you could pump first since I was a teenager in the 90s.

> New Jersey

Nitpick, but last I checked, New Jersey still doesn't let you pump your own gas.

Very true, but by definition that means that you need to establish payment before they will pump. I thought it would unnecessarily complicate my comment to mention this so I'm actually glad you made this comment so I could make this reply.

The Constitution isn’t code, so new behaviors can’t be stumbled into like a buffer overflow. There is no national outrage over license plates and everyone seems pretty OK with them so the Court is not going to throw a massive wrench into society for no reason by making them unconstitutional.

A huge chunk of the population is fine with Trump blocking people he doesn’t like, and a court ruled that unconstitutional. Just because a huge chunk of people support it doesn’t mean it should be legal and upheld in court.

But that’s a new behavior. How can license plates suddenly become illegal after 100 years, unless there is an “evolving standard of decency” in this regard?

The government is in it rights to very specifically limit what people/corporations/muni's can do with license plate data.

Say a savant in your neighborhood has been able to memorize everyone's license plate, when and where they park. This violates a privacy law on data retention. Do you advocate fining and imprisoning the savant for the facets of her mind? Would you advocate that if this information ended up in a book, that the government should start collecting these books and destroying them? Maybe in a fire? like a book burning?

> Do you advocate fining and imprisoning the savant for the facets of her mind?

No I advocate not taking you seriously from now on.

>> Do you advocate fining and imprisoning the savant for the facets of her mind?

>No

>The government is in it rights to very specifically limit what people[...] can do with license plate data.

Ok, thanks for retracting your previous position, for a second there you were advocating for people to be imprisoned for things they do with their mind.

it's ridiculous how much cars are ephemeral today. you have to read a physical license plate to know which car it is, possibly even a vin number. registration is tracked on your car by a 2 inch sticker

soon enough (realistically 15-20 years) license plates may still be around but no one is going to use them. the car is going to identify itself electronically. and i am a huge personal freedoms and privacy supporter but i am all for this.

They're already being piloted.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/06/01/616043976...

> the devices are also able to show ads

Ahh of course. Heaven forbid anyone ever not be looking at an ad.

Why? I'm not seeing the benefit of this.

>i am a huge personal freedoms and privacy supporter but i am all for this.

Not that huge

kind of funny this came about after someone broke the law 15 times, not for any real invasion of privacy or property.

In my area parking enforcement has ALPR. The computer tells them when to stop and issue a citation. Pole mounted ALPRs are popping up in major intersections, and along two lane roads in wealthy areas.

All of the mobile "Your speed is" trailers also have ALPR. You can leave your phone at home, but law enforcement still knows where you're at.

"Automatic number plate recognition" for the curious.

Ah, the 'L' is for 'number'!

I think if we allow cameras in the many public space then in a sense can always be geographically tracked. Also if we assume that dropping things in public means we forfeited any privacy concerns, like our DNA from skin cells, or our fingerprints from cups, in a way we already have the line of privacy drawn very far back.

Yep, my thought was that it was only a matter of time (probably not much) before chalking was replaced with cameras connected to computers anyway.

Exactly. The traffic cop can just write down the license plates, take pictures, whatever is convenient. The city could use cameras and automate a great deal of the process. All without ever touching the car except for placing the ticket on the windshield when it's issued (and why is that not trespassing?! probably because by then the officer has evidence of a violation, thus curing the trespass).

If you read the article, the 4th amendment has 2 parts. Is it a search and is it reasonable. Chalking is not reasonable because at the moment of chalking, the car is in a legal position. Placing a ticket is reasonable because at the time of placement, it is no longer in a legal position.

Otherwise no one can place parking tickets no more.

Isn't that what I wrote?

spray the time notation between the front and back tires. (with chalk). the tool will be 600x the cost of chalk-on-a-stick but at least it's a durable 1x capex.

what if the chalk is from the previous car?

if you've got a device to spray time notation with chalk, you probably can also spray some notation of the car model or license plate

One requires a text entry interface and one requires a battery and a quartz crystal

"A chalked tire was ephemeral. I doubt that whatever replaces it will be."

I suspect you are right and share your foreboding...

However, a very easy solution would be to just mark the asphalt around the tires ... maybe write "blue chevy" between the marks.

So easy.

Instead, a politically connected services firm will capture local mayors / council members (very, very cheaply - shockingly cheaply) and build it into their unnecessary speed/redlight camera systems.

Cops with license plate scanners that also check for warrants and cross reference your movements over time is my guess.

And then the police departments sell the information to 3rd party advertising companies to make up for shortfalls in their budget.

That's error-prone (what if another blue chevy replaces it?), and takes 10 times as long as a simple mark, and doesn't work when the road is sandy or wet, and you need some quick way to erase the last marks, etc.

I can't think of anything nearly as quick and cheap and effective as a chalk mark on the tire.

I can think of a way.

Police could walk around with a hand held license plate scanner, that electronically tracks the general location of the parking space, and the car.

I bet this could be done with a phone app, actually.

In urban areas the city could even work with local property owners to place video cameras that have enough angle to be able to have a constant view of all the cars that park. Could automate ticketing car owners who overstay.

*Not that I wish for this, but it's theoretically possible to implement.

incentivize this by passing 20% of the ticket price back to the property owner

How do we de-incentivize doing cop’s jobs for them on HN? This is a great idea with one problem: fuck the police.

Ban parking cars on public property. Then nobody needs to be tracking how long it's there for.

Fully agreed.

Palo Alto does something like this.

I know, but that's a little slower, way more expensive, and fails if the battery runs out or the GPS can't connect, or the license plate is too dirty to read.

Obviously the chalk method isn't perfect either, but it's close.

There are also a lot of advantages once you automate this via a camera. Now you can put cheap cameras near spots and/or mount the cameras on cars to automate ticketing as police are driving around on other business.

That is how parking enforcement works here in the Netherlands. Someone just drives a camera-equipped car around and everything happens automatically - you enter your license plate on the meter so times are known to the minute.

There are parking meters in the US city I live in, where you enter your license plate and you don't have to fill an individual meter or display a tag on your dash.

If the license plate is too dirty to read, give them a ticket for that instead.

Penalty should be greater than for the parking infraction anyway, otherwise people would dirty their plates deliberately.

I think Salt Lake City for one does enforce parking this way.

San Francisco already does. Hell, it might actually be built into the enforcement vehicle (the Interceptors!), but don’t quote me on that part.

My city does this (Florianopolis, Brazil). I can use a smart phone app to start the clock or just let an officer pass by and tag my car. Chalking seems very... rudimentary.

They're not exactly equivalent. Tire-chalking essentially proves that the vehicle didn't move (or that the driver was ridiculously unlucky in that the mark showed up at about the same location). The number/license plate merely shows that the same car is in the same parking spot, so the (legal, if arguably too "letter of the law") approach of vacating the space and parking there again is indistinguishable from overstaying the limit.

I believe most jurisdictions require you to leave a space for some time before the parking "resets"

How would they know that hadn't happened?

If you require vehicles to be gone from a certain street for 24 hours, say, before parking there again for a 2 hour spot, and you check it at 1 pm then later at 4 pm, you can conclude the vehicle wasn't gone for 24 hours.

What about a notebook and pen? Note car number plate and/or description of car and location. If you've got somebody going wrong chalking tyres, you can have that person take notes instead.

(This might also take a bit longer than making a chalk mark, but time is not exactly of the essence here.)

I searched for "number plate" because I am pretty sure this is what is done in UK/Europe and I have no idea why you would consider doing anything else?

But nobody saying "license plate" is suggesting this - is there some reason why not?

Chalking seems 100% unreliable and very open to legal challenge.

I assume it's just harder to write down license plate "numbers" in the US since they are both less strictly formatted and less unique than any national plates in Europe (that I am aware of).

From a short search, it seems that license plate numbers aren't even unique across state borders in the US, for example.

In the UK equipment varies.

I've seen smartphone based license scanners, Psion-based data entry terminals (they punch in each and every offenders license plate), but parking meters tend to have a paper receipt you place on the dashboard or stick to the window. But now they have a pay-using-an-app option ... They take your licence plate details always and check it against an online db, and if not then they look for a paper ticket.

Pretty much, if you park in a time limited street zone or a metered zone or a municipal car park ... You can be assured your car number plate is captured along with entry and exit times.

The data is likely sold on too

I find all of these solutions wonderfully low-tech. In Amsterdam, they slowly drive google streetview-style car which autotmatically records number plates, looks them up, and issues fines where necessary. The only thing needed is someone to drive the car, and I'm sure that's also going to replaced eventually.

Parking clocks solves the problem easily.

http://www.ericandleandra.com/2014/07/28/memory-monday-parki...

A photo

> So easy. Instead, a politically connected services firm will capture local mayors / council members (very, very cheaply - shockingly cheaply) and build it into their unnecessary speed/redlight camera systems.

I agree that there’s a history of questionable business practices in that industry but those systems are far from unnecessary. Motor vehicles being driven irresponsibly kill something like 40k Americans per year and cause all sorts of injuries and quality of life reductions. Cameras are a good way to discourage that without using tons of police time or dragging in questions of fairness — the call should be punishing corruption, not giving up a valuable tool.

Cities all around the SF Bay Area have been removing their red light cameras. Here in Menlo Park the city just dropped ours. And about time! They were widely hated for mailing people fake tickets for minor infractions that were not a safety hazard at all, like slowly rolling through a right turn with no other traffic in the vicinity.

I used to be annoyed by red light cameras because they triggered on "safe" infractions, like right turns on red. Over the past few years I've changed my mind, because I've almost been hit as a pedestrian and on my bike by people sliding through intersections, to the point where I've physically prevented myself from being hit by pushing off the car a couple times.

Right on red is awesome as a driver, but it makes roads really dangerous for other road users. I think bad intersection design is partly to blame for perceived "frivolous" red light tickets, but at the same time I think that drivers really should come to a complete stop before the line (and before the crosswalk if there is one) before deciding if a right turn on red is safe or practicable. If people can't even be bothered to stop for a right turn on red then it's probably better to ban them outright.

Also, I've seen enough people run red lights 2-3 seconds after the light changes that I want red light cameras at every intersection anyways. It might be 1 in every 250 people who gets dinged for the right turn on red ticket, but that's stupidly dangerous.

If a fix is needed, increase the fine for blowing the light, scale it based on the time the light had been red (so you don't excessively punish people who got caught in the zone of indecision), and reduce the fine for rolling through a right on red.

Do you always look both ways before entering the street? I always try to do that, both because that's what I was taught to do as a child, and because it seems like the best way to ensure my safety when walking. The only times as a pedestrian when I've been nearly hit by a car is when I've failed to do that.

If you don't look both ways, why not?

Here are 2 scenarios that might explain OP's point of view.

You are walking up to an intersection and the crosswalk sign is green. You look right and across the intersection all the traffic is stopped. You look left and there is a car coming, but it is clearly slowing down for the red light. You step into the intersection, but the car doesn't actually stop. They turn right at the intersection. You have to jump away. The problem here is not that you didn't look, but that you misinterpreted what the car was doing. It would be best to wait until all approaching cars are actually stopped before entering the intersection, but next time you are crossing a street I challenge you to see if you always do that. It's surprisingly uncommon because the car is "obviously" stopping.

The second is more of a clear cut problem. Bicycles often travel at speeds much faster than people expect. It's not unusual for a road bike to be going over 30 km/h (just under 20 mph). Cars should wait for you to clear the intersection, but often they aren't looking for bikes and will make a right hand turn, cutting off the cyclist. It happened to me many times in Canada. I'm very happy that the turn-on-red rule is not allowed in Japan where I live now.

California has a little-known law that tries to protect bicyclists from the "right hook" accident you mention. If there is a bike lane, drivers are required to merge into the bike lane before turning right, instead of turning from the car lane and cutting across the bike lane.

This is why bike lane stripes have a dotted section when approaching an intersection, to give drivers a hint about what they are supposed to do. Unfortunately, only a minority of drivers understand and follow the hint.

https://sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/

> They were widely hated for mailing people fake tickets for minor infractions that were not a safety hazard at all, like slowly rolling through a right turn with no other traffic in the vicinity.

You meant to say “real tickets”, right, since you described someone actually breaking the law — and I've seen many, many times where “no other traffic” meant “no other traffic which the driver saw, correctly understood, and respected”. I've had a few close calls in crosswalks and there's nothing fake about it.

Not as easy at tapping a tire with a long stick as you drive by

Afaik, here in Sweden they use something called "digital cameras". They take a picture of said car and placement on street and just compare it later on.

The article mentions a likely candidate for replacement: "parking enforcement officers could sidestep the constitutional issue altogether by simply taking a photo of the car rather than using chalk"

> A chalked tire was ephemeral. I doubt that whatever replaces it will be.

My girlfriend tells me of a homeless guy that used to roam the streets of Bondi, Australia – as in the famous beach – rubbing the chalk off the tyres. This guy never said a word, just shuffled about rubbing off chalk. Suffice to say he was a local hero.

Now he’s gonna have to learn how to DROP TABLE.

> ...roam the streets of Bondi, Australia

This ruling applies to the US, not Australia.

It was a highly relevant but non-local anecdote - who cares where it is? I happened to find it a cute random act of kindness (or rebellion).

Not cute or kind for people who want a fair shot at parking like everyone else and can't because people are abusing the system for their own selfish reasons, enabled by someone rubbing the chalk off.

I agree, which is why I put the "or rebellion" bit, at the same time, it's not like the people parking are paying someone to go around rubbing chalk off so I can't say they're "abusing the system" as they have no expectation of getting away with it.

Regardless, it's story a friend of a friend told somebody, who knows how true

It was a thing all over Sydney throughout the 90s. We used to do it too (and I'm pretty sure I saw the guy your girlfriend is referring to, or another like him). We'd skate down at Bondi and throughout the city and if we saw the inspector chalking a street, we'd come down later and wipe them off. Same as topping up parking meters. If you found money on the ground you'd just stick it in the next expired parking meter you saw. No one liked having coins rattling around in your pocket while skating.

The emotion/motivation behind this seems kind of peculiar to me. Sure, it's a nice thing for the person who is parked, but not for the person who isn't parked, at any given moment. Would it be a worthwhile good deed to find people who have just been to an ATM and give them some more money?

I don't go around ranting about inequality much in general; I'm just bemused by the implication that increasing it is obviously good karma.

na, it's more anti-authority us v. them than it is "how can I be most effective at helping others". cops can sometimes be a pain to skaters, and cops can sometimes be a pain to illegally parked cars. The less times the cops win, the better.

Yup pretty much this. Any benefit to the car owners was purely a happy coincidence. I'd say the homeless guy mentioned above (and know for a fact others who did it in the same area/era) were doing it for the same reason.

I remember seeing a homeless guy feeding a large amount of bread to pigeons on the sidewalk, if you get my drift.

I thought it was amusing, but I didn't park on the street.

Ideally the authorities are working to achieve efficient use of parking space and funding for local government. I suspect such "anti-authority" protestors are not really informed enough to make a reasonable guess as to whether their interventions will be a net benefit. As is, to me, it just seems like people messing with the system because they can't compare the abstract benefits of increased parking efficiency, to the more obvious costs of someone experiencing the displeasure of a parking ticket.

If you treat the populace as a closed system, and the government as an external actor, then these actions increase total utility by preventing larger losses to the external actor.

"closed system...external actor"

Hmm...a _closed_ system sort of implies there are no external actors doesn't it?

Your statement appears superficially dispassionate and hypothetical, but I don't think it makes any sense unless it is unpacked as a lot of normative statements that would be very controversial if explicitly stated.

The statement makes perfect sense. A closed system does not mean there cannot be an external actor. Your statement however, is intentionally superficially dispassionate.

The idea that "external actors" by definition cause losses to a system no matter what they do makes no sense to me. If Darth Vader gives me a cookie, there is no contradiction between the cookie having utility and him being Darth Vader.

Please default to trust. Just because you didn't understand my statement doesn't mean it's nonsense. I'll try again.

Everything depends on how you frame it. When making decisions, you can maximize utility for just yourself, or perhaps for friends and family, or maybe for everyone in your small town. How you choose to frame who you care about will determine the decisions you make. If you include "the government" in this frame of reference, there is no overall change in net utility when a ticket is given. Someone pays a large sum of money (negative utility) and it goes into government coffers (positive utility).

People who put change in meters likely do not include "the government" in their system of utility. In that frame of reference, a ticket being written is a net decrease in utility because the positive utility of government revenue doesn't matter.

My point is, actions that seem irrational to you may actually be understood as rational when viewed from a different frame of reference.

"People who put change in meters likely do not include "the government" in their system of utility. In that frame of reference, a ticket being written is a net decrease in utility because the positive utility of government revenue doesn't matter."

I think I get what you are saying...for instance, arresting a serial killer would be a net decrease in utility, because the positive utility enjoyed by government workers being paid to prosecute, etc. doesn't matter when you don't consider the government as part of your logical system.

Are you sure you are using an orthodox style of reasoning?

If the "closed ayatem" is the serial killer, then yes, of course. And many criminals do indeed think the system is stacked against them and is unfair, because they haven't internalized that their wrongdoings impact other people.

I'm not using orthodox reasoning. I'm just explaining a perspective you don't seem to understand. And you don't have to agree with it to understand.

A little civil disobedience is good for the soul

Its scary that they equated chalking to GPS trackers. Pervasiveness is exactly the difference between the two. It seems that the courts did not recognize that.

Every single car should be constantly tracked, they are killing machines. 2 million die a year due to the cars.

100% of murders and homicides are comited by people. Every single person should be constantly tracked, they are killing machines.

My hunch is that the sort of tracking you dread is on its way regardless of what happened in this case. Over time, the only likely difference of this court result is that parking enforcement agents will have some software that tells them about the license plates with expired time... license plates they may have already been bulk collecting for broader purposes. Speculation... but... we'll see....

I'm pretty sure where I live they already don't use chalk, but instead use cars/gocarts with license plate scanners, driven by parking enforcement officers, that drive up and down the streets, recording what cars were where when. The system will flag em to stop and ticket where required.

I think this is quite common now in the US?

Googling, I'm not sure if it's not quite common yet (yet!), or there just hasn't been a lot of attention to it?

https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/License-Plate-Scanning...

https://ops-com.com/parking-security-platform/license-plate-...

https://www.genetec.com/solutions/industries/parking-enforce...

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7186110-181/crimebeat-wha...

I had a very pleasant experience with "Parking Enforcement" in a commercial district outside of Pittsburgh recently. I had either forgot to put money in the meter or it ran out. Got back to my car to find a ticket. The fine was only a dollar and I think it was voluntary. On the ticket was printed a note explaining that the business community really values people coming to visit and so doesn't want to annoy those people with high parking rates or ticket fines. It was the most pleasant parking ticket experience I could imagine.

Just think about how many people over the years haven't decided that was a good place to clean out the trash from their cars after receiving such a nice ticket.

What bizarre machinations of Moloch; "we decided to fine you, but then we decided to not fine you, so we had to settle on fining you as little as possible while still fining you because we have to fine you or there wouldn't be a reason for this sub-sub-department of us to exist."

Yeah. I'd like to have seen how that compromised between business owners and the traffic police was negotiated.

Bureaucracy being lenient and reasonable can look a little dystopian. I'll take it.

The question is, does it significantly reduce the number of people overstaying on the parking spot? A good use of parking meters is to ensure shared access to a limited parking resource. You can't just park your car all day there. You have to keep going back every hour to fill the meter, which means that you will usually leave and let someone else park there for a while.

The amount of the fine is irrelevant. It's just an annoyance to ensure that you realise the need to share the resource. If it does that, then the smaller the fine, the better.

I think the "fine" was the cost of feeding the meter. To be paid if the person wants or not.

That could be the rationale, but I doubt it. Seems more likely they were trying to keep their target numbers up (they're not allowed to call them "quotas" anymore). An officer with low numbers gets passed up for promotion. A department with low numbers gets passed up for budget increases. Gotta keep writing tickets, or there isn't a reason to exist anymore...

I think it's more likely that the business community told the traffic police to piss off. This was a financially distressed community whose main street business district is trying to bounce back.

I would much rather they chalk my tires than store my car's license plate and location in a database...

I find it strange we the people for the people by the people don't just straight up outlaw things like this with an amendment.

The constitution is a great document that lasted far longer than expected. And surprisingly holds up extremely well to modern era technological change.

But I suspect the founding fathers would be down right horrified by the loss of privacy and liberty that has taken place in the name of safety.

Why do they need chalk or a location database? Find a better solution that doesn't require loss of privacy. It's not hard even with tech from 50 years ago.

We are supposedly at the pinnacle of civilization and knowledge. Yet we are not yet wise or skilled enough to question and alter that which governs us?

I mean a lot has changed since then our understanding of the reasoning may have been loss but I suspect non breaking improvements may be a viable course of action.

Try to mentally write the amendment, then attack it like a security researcher/lawyer would.

It's really hard to write such a provision without an "unless it's for a reasonable use" clause large enough to drive a truck through, and you can't just leave that one off either.

It's not a bad exercise to try, though.

(I fear opening the amendment process at this point, to be honest. I'd give good odds Amendment 28, no matter what it is, will be longer than the entire rest of the Constitution, with the way legislation has gone lately.)

Better yet, try and rewrite it from the perspective of an 18th century white man and see how it deals with over 200 years of technological progress.

ocdtrekkie's response is a pretty good response to your post, too. When you write in broad statements of principle, even someone from the late 18th isn't completely lost. It wasn't at all news to them that invasions of privacy represented power over the one being invaded, and given that they were already concerned with the degree of privacy invasion possible in the 18th century, it's not like there's any chance they would suddenly go "Oh, well, a little primitive 18th-century invasion by a government is an unacceptable assertion of power over people, but when you can do it at a large scale with technological precision I never dreamed of, oh, that's totally OK."

Or is the suggestion that because 18th century white people would consider the modern day Facebook an atrocity, it is incumbent upon us to submit to their privacy invasions because otherwise we're like privileging old dead white people or something, which we are far too sophisticated for in this here 21st century?

See, the thing is, and why I wish we had more like the original Bill of Rights, was they weren't legalese. They were intentionally broad constructs that the courts could interpret to the modern day. I want a Constitutionally-protected "right to privacy", so that courts can determine how x, y, or z weighs against that right.

> See, the thing is, and why I wish we had more like the original Bill of Rights, was they weren't legalese.

Yes, they were; they may not seem that way because in many cases they have shaped common usage and understanding of terms beyond the legal space, but they absolutely leveraged existing specialized legal terms of art.

The sad answer is that the great majority of voters are ignorant and/or apathetic about privacy - at least in comparison to things like taxes and health care. The population that is willing to vote against party lines for privacy is trivial, whereas the government (at every scale) is heavily incentivized to invade privacy.

Before we can change the government, we need to make people care - and while recent debacles (see: Facebook) have helped, there's a long way to go yet.

Corporations and their largest beneficiaries will use their media companies and donation/lobbying dollars to spread propaganda within one or more parties to create enough doubt that nothing will happen. That's what needs to be attacked. They got a lot right in the early 20th century around media consolidation and antitrust.

The not sad answer is that the great majority of voters understand that there has to be a tradeoff between the ability of the police to detect and enforce the law and our personal privacy.

Generally, transparency, rather than privacy, could be reasonably said to be the driving function of government -- things like arrest records, court records, marriage records, real estate transactions, are all public records, with exceptions being made only for cases where the harm of the record itself exceeds the public benefit. To facilitate credit markets we've even gone so far as to make personal credit information semi-public.

If you want something to be private, it's your responsibility to keep it private. And all privacy goes away in the face of a lawful search and seizure, accompanied by probable cause. The (very wiggly) privacy line is only crossed when another party goes to unreasonable lengths to violate situations where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

If only we could devise a system under which all voters wouldn't have to be informed about every topic. A system of, say, representatives to whom the citizens would delegate their power. These representatives would then use their proxy and be responsible for learning and implementing policy about whatever topic comes up.

A populace which is passionate about a topic is more likely to see legislation about it. But it's not the only way.

I find it hard to fathom any issue where there would be enough consensus in the US currently or in the foreseeable future to pass a constitutional amendment.

Adding amendments went out of favor when the federal government misinterpreted the commerce clause so hard that it completely flipped the government power structure; the modern hip way to govern now is to use unelected buercratic committees to determine people's fundamental rights

I'd expect much of that whole prohibition thing also had some effect.

Congress keeps ceding more of its power to the executive, since it can't seem to accomplish much of anything any more. It does allow stuff to get done, but the only oversight is whatever the voters decide to do every four years.

But I suspect the founding fathers would be down right horrified by the loss of privacy and liberty that has taken place in the name of safety.

The local governments will just subscribe to a private sector service that does the same thing without having to deal with all that pesky constitutional bother. Just like they do with DNA searches.

That doesn't prevent constitutional challenges. Georgia's laws were paywalled until someone took the state to court.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/court-tells-georgia-it...

I don't really understand. I don't think most people find chalk on their tire objectionable, except in the case that the chalk is used as evidence to ticket them. This is clearly what happened here. It seems like you're advocating that we solve a problem that for most people doesn't exist…

And let’s not forget what happens if we don’t give out parking tickets.

Assholes park for as long as they please. The rest of us obey the rules for a while, until we realise the assholes are getting one over on us, then we think ‘screw this’ and gradually we also start parking for as long as we please.

Now nobody can ever park, but freedom! What a world.

My gut says this is ridiculous and I can kind of rationalize how putting chalk on something might be like GPS tracker but not really. This is akin to a stamp on your hand at a bar or concert and the only way it violates your privacy is by communicating to people other than law enforcement that you parked publicly.

I'm assuming the marks are put on the tread of the tire and if that's the case then it only reasonable violates your privacy for a short duration. This is akin to being seeing in the local strip club parking lot however far less scandalous.

The fact of the matter is that all cars have a unique identifier clearly visible on at least one outward facing surface. It can just as easily be used by LOE to determine how long you've been parked in a spot with a simple app that snaps a photo and logs GPS coordinates.

The differences being that chalk is temporary and can communicate to interested parties that you've parked recently in local vecinity, where as a license plate requires instance observation to track your movements.

> My gut says this is ridiculous and I can kind of rationalize how putting chalk on something might be like GPS tracker but not really

The legal issue isn't that it is like a GPS tracker, it is that it is a physical trespass (a fairly well-defined legal concept) for the purpose of establishing information to be used against you by the government.

Now, this is also a feature of the GPS tracker case, but it's not the comparison back to the GPS tracker case that is the main issue, but the same underlying principles that have governed the GPS tracker case and a wide range of others.

I have issue with the trespass part as well. If marking chalk on a car is trespassing then wouldn't throwing a newspaper in someone's driveway also be trespassing? So to would leaving a hand print on someone's car if you happened to touch it.

They aren't illegally entering the car, they're putting chalk on the outside of it.

> If marking chalk on a car is trespassing then wouldn't throwing a newspaper in someone's driveway also be trespassing?

Yes, without permission, dumping on someone's property is a trespass.

> So to would leaving a hand print on someone's car if you happened to touch it.

It is a trespass, yes. Probably not on its own an actionable one (or at least not one worth civil action) because of the lack of harm, but whether a trespass would be actionable or worth action as tort is irrelevant in the case where you are looking at a Fourth Amendment violation where any trespass by givernment for gathering information to be used against a person (as a violation of legal property rights) is, ipso facto, a violation of an expectation of privacy, triggering the requirements associated with a search.

Nonsense. Trespass is deliberate interference with another person's property right. Does a hand print or chalk mark prevent someone from making use of his car? The answer is obviously no.

So you can vandalize my car with chalk all you want as long as it doesn’t violate my possessory interest?

Isn't vandalism different from trespass?

Vandalism is a form of trespass.

If you want your car to remain in pristine condition, keep it in your garage. Don't park it in a public space. In a shared space undesirable things happen. Just because you object to something doesn't make it a crime. Guilty mind plus guilty deed make something a crime.

I'm neither a lawyer nor american, but couldn't you use this case as precedent that looking up the numberplate in a database is also "gathering information to ultimately impose a government sanction"?

The "trespassing upon a privately-owned vehicle" seems pretty relevant, and I doubt it would apply to reading the plate.

It's not your license plate.

What do you mean? Aren't license plates already stored in a database? How else do they know who owns a plate?

Yes, but now there's a record of every time and place you've ever parked.

I think this sets a broader precedent about what evidence gathering practices are acceptable.

I'd rather they do neither because it's a nuisance that is more trouble than it's worth.

If they're doing it right, they probably only store an integer foreign key to your existing license plate record. :D

The logical solution would be for cities to switch to photographs and even automated cameras, which in the end will probably be more invasive of privacy than a chalk mark on your tires.

Funny how the legal system can work sometimes.

The more logical solution, from the city's perspective, might be to just get rid of free-but-time-limited parking. Then parking meters could serve as both the enforcement mechanism and another revenue source.

The article is inconclusive on this point, but many cities have paid and time-limited parking. The same issue applies whether parking is free or paid.

In some jurisdictions, the law states that you may not park in the same spot longer than a specified interval without moving your car.

In order to determine whether a car has moved between successive passes of Parking Enforcement, chalk (or another method) is used to determine whether the car has moved.

I have seen some cities that further prohibit parking anywhere on the same block after the time limit has expired; this eliminates have to determine whether the car has moved since you can't simply drive around the block and back to your initial space.

If they tried to do that then they'd have a massive protest by traffic enforcement people. They don't want that.

If you look at almost any seemingly wasteful/pointless/inefficient thing a local government does, you're pretty much guaranteed to find jobs behind it. The very slight relief of annoyance from what these things cause to the general public is not enough to overcome the extreme outrage that occurs when a group of people lose their jobs.

Why. Park, register with a meter. Your first 15 minutes are free, as they used to be. More time is paid time. Unregistered parking leads to an immediate ticket.

Those who did not abuse the system continue to park for free, and may expect more vacant spaces.

Most of my tickets have been from timed and metered parking. That is, I had to pay, and I wasn't allowed to pay for longer than X continuous hours.

Don't be so sure:

> And that search wasn't reasonable, the court said. The city searches vehicles "that are parked legally, without probable cause, or even so much as 'individualized suspicion of wrongdoing' — the touchstone of the reasonableness standard," the court wrote.

This is linchpin of the ruling. If a parked car is not suspected of wrongdoing, it could conceivably be argued that photographing it to establish wrongdoing is exactly the same as chalking it. IANAL

Then would police even be allowed to look at the car with their own eyes, and remember?

That's the heart of the matter, isn't it? How can chalking be a search when the fact that the car is parked there is in plain sight? If we regard "search" as a synonym of "google", then yes, we can say that the act of chalking allowed the police to acquire knowledge it didn't have before. I don't think the framers meant that though when they wrote the 4th Amendment. A search needs to involve something that's concealed.

The problem is that chalk is placed at a certain angle and falls off easily, which can indicate whether a car has moved or not. Photographs would largely only show that a car is in the same place it was in before, not whether it had left and come back in the meantime.

Don't these already exist?

"The logical solution would be for cities to switch to photographs and even automated cameras, which in the end will probably be more invasive of privacy than a chalk mark on your tires."

The logical solution is to chalkmark the asphalt next to the wheels. Line drawn perpendicular to center of each wheel ... "blue honda" written next to it.

Zero cost, problem solved.

A lot of places in Europe just use a parking disk. No chalking, no second check needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_parking

Ah, so, the honor system.

Not quite - if you try to game the system by post dating your arrival time, and the disc is checked quickly enough, the enforcer will see the disc time is ahead of the current time = ticket.

but you could come back after an hour and update the time

and you can wipe chalk off your tires after an hour, too.

I have seen officers making notes of how the tires are aligned so they know whether the car has been moved when they come by a second time. (Seen in DACH countries)

What's to say you didn't leave and return and your wheels are in roughly the same configuration?

20 years ago Portland, Oregon used to chalk tires and had coin fed meters in downtown. And a fleet of go-cart driving officers for the rest of the city.

Around that time the city started moving to electronic meters in downtown that produced a printed ticket with a time that you were required to post on a street facing window. There was the usual city waste and political kickbacks iirc, at least one city employee got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Now the traffic enforcement officers have a handheld plate scanner, on each end of every block the parking enforcement signs have a QR-like code on the back that the officers first scan, then they go down the block scanning every car, then they scan the sign at the other end. This defines a complete audit trail of the officers movement with respect to every block and every car.

Using this technique, they not only scan for expired tickets, but can also issue citations for expired plates, previously unpaid tickets, warrants for outstanding criminals (in which they notify city police) and even summon a boot or tow truck.

I suspect that all cities that use chalk now will eventually move to some fully automated system like this. Perhaps not even ticket printing machines, just cameras looking down at all the cars, watching them (and you) come and go. Stay too long, and you get a ticket in the mail. Have a warrent on you an the police are there waiting when you return. The upshot for them? Besides the usual hands in cookie jars like in Portland, they won't have to pay all those traffic enforcement officers.

My city about 10 years ago have a car that drives with a camera scans every plate and with a GPS location. You have to move your car about 2 feet and you are fine.

They also moved away from towing to a boot. If your on a boot for 48+ hours then they tow. $50 for the boot to be removed or $275 for the tow and $85 per day in parking.

Reminds me of tolls.

It makes me comically angry that our toll roads require RFID equipment in most cars and slow cash lanes for people without. The fallback for people running the toll booth is to automatically take a photo of the plate and send the owner a bill.

Why not just use the fallback system as the primary system?

You already have the equipment to collect tolls automatically. Why do I need to glue something to my window or wait in a long line to pay cash?

Comically angry because I know this is "old man yells at cloud" territory.

Roads are already moving to your system, Massachusetts did a couple years ago, for example.

https://www.mass.gov/service-details/learn-more-about-ezdriv...

The Golden Gate Bridge did away with cash lanes a long time ago. There are signs that tell you to go to their website, where you can enter your license plate number and pay with a credit card.

Couldn't take the time to park legally then went out of her way to launch a lawsuit against the city. This is not community behavior. It's toxic.

Something makes me think that that particular location doesn’t have abundant legal parking options available, which in turn is a community problem. I’m not defending her, but it’s a two sided coin.

Why is it the public's responsibility to provide and offer people space on public right aways to [temporarily] store people's private property?

There's a common benefit to having spots available for businesses and other uses. Its sort of why we have parking meters in the first place, so people don't camp spots all day long.

I get this. But this isn't a community problem. It's a community choice.

For free mind you (at least in this case)

For the same reason it's the public responsibility to provide infrastructure to get private property from A to B (roads), protect people's private property (police, military, firefighters), etc. It's just infrastructure.

Yeah, this does seem like someone getting away with antisocial behavior.

The thing about the US legal system (and other systems derived from English law) though, is that legal rulings aren’t only about the particular case — they establish general principles that will be applied in a variety of future cases.

So, if they’re doing their jobs properly, judges should not be thinking of how sympathetic a particular party in a particular case is.

One famous example of this is Ernesto Miranda, by all accounts a horrible monster (murderer and rapist). The Supreme Court rightly ignored the distasteful nature of the particular individual, and threw out his confession as having been illegally obtained. That’s why we have what are now called Miranda rights, something practically every liberal can agree is a good thing.

(Tangent: in case you were wondering, Ernesto Miranda was still convicted, in the end. The evidence against him was strong enough even without the illegally-obtained confession.)

"Yeah, this does seem like someone getting away with antisocial behavior."

I think I would agree with you, if she lost ...

However, the ruling suggests that her behavior was not antisocial by definition.

I have never thought to care about this issue, nor would I spend my time fighting it, but if the constitution is ruled to disallow this behavior her lawsuit was, again, by definition, a socially positive act ...

She was still parking illegally, the court just threw out the method they used to catch her.

> the ruling suggests that her behavior was not antisocial by definition.

The law is not the definition of pro- or anti-social behavior.

Instead of chalking the tire they can chalk the pavement just before and after the tires. Perhaps they could even write the license plate number on the pavement too.

The appeal of chalking the tires is you can do it pretty fast, and if the car moves, so does the chalk.

Chalking the ground doesn't work - "I just got here. That was chalk from before."

Chalking the license plate doesn't work, it takes way too much time to write out all the license plates .

My understanding is that the chalking is mostly an aid for the parking people to keep tabs. "I just got here" can be used for any situation involving a ticket can't it? It's your word against the parking person anyway.

> and if the car moves, so does the chalk. But the person handing out tickets would notice they moved. Or, if a person is trying that hard to evade tickets while still parking were they aren't supposed to, wouldn't they just wipe off the chalk?

The chalk on the tread of the tire proves you didn't just get there, though. If you did, then it would not have been possible for the parking enforcement officer to have chalked it an hour ago.

But if it's on the pavement, it's not crazy to imagine the marks were for a previous car, and that you parked in the same spot. Even the officer would be unsure of it.

Chalk your own tires, it's the only way to be sure.

They can also have a flat fee system $X/hr and afix that parking fee to your car then give you X days to pay, or they alternatively can require using an app to park at a spot. Or they can write city code to say in order to park on city property you volunteer this kind of “search” implicitly.

> ...rewrite city code....

The law can’t force you to waive your constitutional rights. That’s the point of writing them into the constitution.

But you have the right to waive your rights. I think they can say, you can park, but only under these conditions? I could be wrong and I’d love to know what the answer is.

I mean it’s like when you enter government buildings and they say “no firearms” despite the constitution.

You do have the right to waive (most of) your rights, but a right is something you have to affirmatively exercise. The government can’t waive your rights for you.

Ahem.. second cough amendment cough .

The second amendment includes the word "regulated" for a reason.

The term meant "disciplined" or "skilled" at that time.

The 2A doesn't authorize the militia, that was authorized in Article 1 Section 8, specifically "[The Congress shall have the Power] To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia."

Note that when the Constitution gives the government power it plainly notes as much.

..in reference to the militias, not the arms. Meaning training and proficiency.

Yep, and who gets to set the standards for training and proficiency? And what exactly is a "militia"? Surely it's not random people with firearms. That would not be very well regulated (in any sense), would it?

That reasoning was pretty much explicitly shot down in Heller.

"To promote X, you have right Y" does not mean the existence of right Y is dependent on X.

Except there are a lot of instances where they do waive your rights, at least as much as agreeing to park. TSA and searches come to mind. Though the language of the second amendment is debatable, there are a lot of "gun free" zones (not to mention how difficult it is to buy a gun in a place like New Jersey). You don't have freedom of speech in many circumstances, such as in the courtroom when a judge bars you from speaking. Prison is another example where basically every right is removed...or school.

Speedy and public trial is regularly a falsehood, particularly in some jurisdictions (NYC for example). That right is removed because it's inconvenient for the government/budget.

Excessive fines too could be debated, particularly given the state of parking and impound fines being the same across all income levels.

There are reasons for each of those, but it does seem that the government can choose to remove any right they want to in specific circumstances.

To be fair, the moment words "safety" or "terrorism" is involved most our current system goes to complete crap. There's plenty of exemptions in written laws for those phrases, not to mention the mentality of judges/juries and lawmakers with those phrases.

EDIT: I better add this, not against laws for safety, but thigns like the Patriot Act or the TSA (and how they fail to actually find contraband) are examples where things have gone to far "in the name of security" and they either provide little additional benefit (TSA) or IMO violate rights (Patriot Act).

What if the pavement is wet? What if there's ice or snow? Will chalk hold up then? What if there is no pavement? Dirt roads, brick roads, or even grassy areas can all be used for parking.

Tire rubber is constant across all these environments. That's what makes the chalking approach work so well. Whatever replaces it must be equally ubiquitous.

Didn't the whole "drinking and driving" thing establish that the 14th amendment is limited when it comes to the complicated relationship between a private vehicle on publicly-owned roads?

I can see the argument that a GPS tracking device crosses the line because the intent is to track the owner of the vehicle and the scope is far beyond their interaction with the public roadway.

But on this? It's directly about your usage of the public roadway for storage purposes.

This case seems to be more about the 4th amendment.

It's about the rights in the Fourth as incorporated against the states by the Fourteenth, just like DUI stop cases, but the safety factors at issue in the DUI (and other traffic) stop cases that have been held to make limited stops reasonable without cause short of probable cause do not seem to apply to the case here.

This is really interesting.

The summary is that chalking a car is similar to attaching a GPS device without a warrant, and it violates fourth amendment rights.

I imagine an easy workaround for this is to just take photos of the license plates with geolocation and have an app that can easily show you who was there ~ 1 hour ago. Probably less efficient initially, but I'm sure they could automate it.

I was under the assumption that they've been scanning license plates for a while now. I don't see chalk on tires in LA anymore. Could be wrong.

You are right, I think a lot of places have moved to this, but I think a lot of less resourced places like a town in Michigan don't yet have this technology at the ready.

Yup they have the photo taking, license plate reading technology in my city of 60,000 (metro 100,000). And now they also enforce the parking restrictions for the full 24 hours on the entire block face. No longer can you drive around the block to move your vehicle and [re]park on the same black face but in a different parking spot.

> I imagine an easy workaround for this is to just take photos of the license plates with geolocation and have an app that can easily show you who was there ~ 1 hour ago

Lots of towns in Canada have exactly that now - it's a vehicle with a ton of cameras on it that just endlessly drives around, and the system automatically issues a ticket to any vehicle it determines has been in the same place longer than permitted.

Oh good, so now cities will need to pay a contractor to develop, operate, and maintain some complex hardware/software solution to perform a task that was until now being easily and efficiently performed using a stick of chalk. Because... reasons.

Hmm... I'll have to keep an eye out for the RFPs.

It already exists. It's just too expensive for small municipalities.

Those cars exist and honestly they're worse to me than chalking because that data is stored and can be used later in theory where chalking is temporary and leaves no data behind that can be used later. I see where the legal argument stems from and makes sense but this really doesn't protect much and the alternative methods use create so much more potential for abuse!

> can be used later

_Can_ be used later.

Of all people, RMS gave a great talk at Hope XII ("We must legislate to block collection of personal data") about how these legal/technical issues can potentially be navigated.

Now, I'm not saying that cameras are the answer, but it is possible to make the technology work for us and not against us. For example, the license plate readers could be programmed to capture images of the license plates which expire after a certain amount of time, are cycled out if the vehicle is not in its previous location upon the next scan, are only accessible via strict access controls, etc. Of course, in RMS' vision, the software controlling these systems is Free and there would be some way for the citizenry to validate that it's doing what it purports to, the system is running an unmodified version, etc. As a matter of practicality, this is probably a pipe dream but it _is_ possible and his talk has made me reconsider my knee jerk Luddite reaction to technological solutions and I'd highly recommend watching/listening/reading the transcript.

Yeah it's definitely technically possible to create a system which would respect and not violate privacy but but the ones in use today definitely don't and that's the current alternative to chalking. On top of that I have a hard time seeing cities going through the work of designing the system you describe.

What about people who stick flyers under windshield wipers? Isn't that also a physical trespass? What about dropping flyers into open car windows, or into convertible cars with the hood down?

Will cities start having "chalk notices" similar to cookie notices that websites have saying that you consent to having your car wheels chalked by using this parking space?

People who stick flyers under windshield wipers aren't government entities, so they aren't bound by constitutional notions of what is and isn't a reasonable search.

Having said that, I really wish this practice was considered a form of property damage or defacement, maybe littering, or at least, as you suggest, a form of trespass.

Both of those are physical trespass, yes.

Would this extend to companies putting flyers under your windshield wipers?

(Years ago—also in Michigan—I turned on my wipers and ended up with a littering citation. Probably still legit, but please don’t put trash on my car.)

No it wouldn't. Constitutionality involves the government, not companies. Your [specific] issue with companies is a civil matter. Whether what they do is criminal is an issue between them and the government (you can certainly call the police and file a complaint about the company littering/trespassing on your property though, but good luck with them doing much of anything).

Everything you said seems accurate.

But I just want to point out a grey area: Where a private company is allowed to act a certain way via a government.

I live in a snowy area. Which means regular plowing/snowblowing during the winter months. A local company started throwing "newspapers" (read: ads) onto everyone's driveway. These were rolled up paper in a plastic bag. They were distributed late in the evenings often getting buried by snow by the following morning, and then clog up or are thrown by snowblowers (and wind up in the streets causing littering, etc).

In theory this is a civil issue between this private company and the property owner ("littering"). But in reality the local government green lit this, they made a specific exception for these ad companies to essentially liter on every resident's property, and because it is legal a lawsuit would likely be unsuccessful (at least until they cause property damage).

So while constitutionality often only applies to government, we're slipping into a situation where private companies are allowed to do things by government and the constitution doesn't work either against the government (because the company did it) or the company (because the government allowed it).

That exception could turn out to be unconstitutional if challenged.

IANAL but while I don't think the 4th Amendment would apply, you might be able to make an argument that they are trespassing? Personally, I'd like to nail the guys who put landscaping flyers in sandwich bags with some rocks and drop them on my driveway.

In my city, littering carries a $200 fine.

Per offense.

> Personally, I'd like to nail the guys who put landscaping flyers in sandwich bags with some rocks and drop them on my driveway.

In the grand scheme of things, this kind of advertising for me is minimal at best. I'd by far much rather that the junk mail I get sent via postal mail would go away, though the practical effect of that would be that the postal system itself would die, I suppose.

That said, had I started collecting the rocks from those baggies the day I bought the house, I'd probably have a pretty nice rock landscaping by now.

Seriously, I wish something could be done about flyers like those. Not just the bag+rock ones, but all of them. I've got real estate agents (the worst for this kind of spam), landscapers, house cleaning, etc all tossing flyers at my house every day. They ultimately just blow away and litter the place.

It's such a small annoyance, but having to pick up the "trash" from these companies every day really grinds my gears.

In what way would this apply? Firstly the Constitution only restricts the government not individuals so kind of out of bounds immediately.

Same with that yellow phone directory. It doesn't matter if you're in the "don't deliver" database - their contractor gets paid by the ton delivered and can't be arsed to check a list. Also, I wish I knew who the contractor was so I could accuse them of trespass and littering.

Plus they require your phone number, name, and an email address to even opt out. Which means you're essentially giving marketers more personal info in order for them to stop littering.

Not as bad as "optoutprescreen" though (credit card junkmail) that requires your SSN.

I used to work in a government office when I was young. One of my jobs was every 165 minutes to go out and wipe the chalk marks off the tires of anyone in the department who parked on that wonderfully close to work street.

I used to listen to a radio show hosted by a law professor and iirc he said that airport security doesn't violate the privacy amendment because you don't have to fly. When you choose to fly you implicitly wave those rights. How is this different?

Probably buried in a clause in your carrier contract. Don't fly commercial (fly your own plane or charter through general aviation not CAT, commercial air transport) and you can avoid searches.

Basically, yes:

9th Circuit Court rules on U.S. vs Davis, 482 F.2d 893, 908... airport screenings are considered to be administrative searches because they are conducted as part of a general regulatory scheme, where the essential administrative purpose is to prevent the carrying of weapons or explosives aboard aircraft ... are allowed if no more intrusive or intensive than necessary, in light of current technology, to detect weapons or explosives, confined in good faith to that purpose, and passengers may avoid the search by electing not to fly

https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/20/how-the-t...

My immediate alternative would be to drop a grape behind a tire.

Though the fact that it's edible is problematic. The rats (with and without wings) would enjoy my scheme.

Still, any cheap inedible alternative would work. As long as, when you squish it, it stays squished.

But that leads me to think: why not build it into the parking spaces? Glue something down that takes just over 2 hours to fully reinflate. Would need to be wide enough to ensure it gets run over. Probably want to be clever and make the reinflation not appear to be linear - once it gets to a certain point, it would stand itself up or something. Would be fun to design.

... now there was that time somebody noticed that the Sheriff always had a vehicle parked at the airport and was curious if it ever moved and proved that it didn't by chalking the tires.

I'm left wondering if the ruling applies to cops using it on people who frequent bars? It's common practice at least in rural areas in Michigan to target cars in bar parking lots.

If you're there for three hours they assume you will be leaving drunk so they put a chalk mark across your headlight. They park down the road and stop everyone with the mark on their headlight.

It's not foolproof because people catch on and wipe down their headlights before leaving the bar ;<).

> It's not foolproof because people catch on and wipe down their headlights before leaving the bar.

There are many reasons it's not foolproof, chiefly among them that leaving a bar is not a basis for knowing that someone is over the legal limit for operating a motor vehicle. The driver might well be a DD.

The 2 hour rule goes away after 6pm but you can still be ticketed for parking overnight.

Honestly paying for parking is an insult in the first place.

Here in MA to drive a car you have to pay.....

1. Sales tax, whether you bought the car out-of-state or not. This is calculated by the RMV and NOT by your bill of sale. So if MA thinks your $500 car is worth $3,000 you're paying 6.25% of $3k.

2. Registration fees that go up every year. This pays for the 4 hours you have to sit at the RMV watching people who get paid $30/hour help one person every 15 minutes.

3. Private insurance, which is required. Lots of out-of-state policies aren't eligible, so we see ads on TV for competetive policies from Progressive, Geiko, ect yet nobody in MA is eligible to buy them. It's worth it to note that state vehicles don't need insurance as they are "self-insured." So if you crash into a cop you or your insurance will pay 100% but if a cop crashes into you the town and its taxpayers get to pay 100%.

4. We have toll booths all over the fucking place yet we still have some of the worst paved road conditions in the country. Anyone who has visited Cambridge MA can attest to this.

5. We pay yearly excise tax on each vehicle to the town we live in.

6. Exorbiant state fuel tax (27th highest in the nation).

How much more can they charge us for infrastructure without actually having to invest anything on infrastructure? On top of property and income tax and sales tax and excise tax you've gotta pay $3 to park on a public street.....

> 6. Exorbiant state fuel tax (27th highest in the nation).

Sounds more like a median state fuel tax.

All by itself sure. Other states usually go one way or another. Tax more here but a little less over there.

MA taxes everything across the board. After factoring in all the other expenses you can easily stand back and call the whole ensemble exorbitant.

Hmm. Well. Let’s see.

5th best healthcare out of the fifty states according to [0].

1st best education system [1].

7th by median household income [2].

Wow! 45th on the infrastructure list [3].

37th on inequality [4].

So, seems like you get what you pay for. My guess is that all those plains states have less people and less infrastructure to maintain in general, and with great opportunities also comes great inequality in some instances.

I did not read a word on any of the linked articles besides rank as I’m at work. But it seems interesting, and I didn’t skip over the ones that surprised me.

[0] - https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/health-care

[1] - https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

[3] - https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/infrastruct...

[4] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_...

Education in MA is nothing special. We look good on paper because we have a lot of rich people to drag the various averages and medians up. The kids of all those pharma engineers, college professors and tech workers tend to do pretty well regardless of the school system you put them through.

If you compare outcomes relative to inputs (i.e. compare poor kids to poor kids and rich kids to rich kids) the range of differences between states gets a lot smaller and it's IIRC Texas and a couple other states you'd never have expected that do the best. Edit: can't find the citation but it was an article that was on HN awhile back.

>MA taxes everything across the board.

But where does it go? Certainly not back to the taxpayers in the form of public services and social programs. The input to output ratio of MA government is highly inefficient yet most people in this state worship at the alter of government authority so nobody questions why it has to be so inefficient.

You could probably look at your state budget and find out, if you are really interested.

Looking at the state budget, or anything published by the state doesn't tell you what is just pork and what positions are jobs programs for the politically well connected. I have immediate family members in state government in MA. It's not like I don't know how this work.

My understanding is that pay for parking (aside from large garages) is generally about space availability rather than making money. Public street parking in Boston is fairly cheap per unit time and my understanding is that the maximum time limits are meant to allow new people to come in and take the spot to do whatever business they need to do in the area. Otherwise people would just squat on spots all day and the businesses would be starved for customers.

Not disagreeing with all the other shenanigans you listed for Ma though.

My annoyance with metered parking in the area isn't so much the cost which, as you say, isn't very expensive. Rather it's that a lot of 2-hour metered parking has been extended from ending at 6pm to ending at 8pm. What that means is that, if you come in for dinner and an evening event, your meter will probably expire before 8pm.

(There is a hack with the online parking app to "feed the meter" although you can potentially get ticketed for that.)

Exactly. If parking time limits weren't enforced, commuters would just park there, hurting local businesses. (I say this having been on both sides of the equation.)

I agree with your assessment, but not entirely. If it weren't at all about making money you could just stand up a kiosk that dispenses parking tickets and not charge money for them. The ticket-to-park method of parking enforcement doesn't require the payment element to enforce parking laws.

I've heard that cities also charge for parking because of an interesting social factor: many people will drive in circles for half an hour looking for a free spot rather than pay for parking in a private lot. Everyone driving around in circles creates more traffic. So the city charges for curbside parking, in order to make the cost more comparable to parking in a private lot, with the hope that it will lower the psychological switching cost from "finding a curbside spot" to "giving up and paying for a garage spot".

> 4. We have toll booths all over

Good news on that one! Most of the toll booths are gone. They've been replaced with electronic overhead gantries, and now they can add more:

https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/03/26/local-news/future-tolli...

Suggested update:

4. They charge us tolls all over the ...

This is why if I ever move back to New England I'd move to New Hampshire. Massachusetts is hopelessly addicted to taxes, it could really use some of New Hampshire's libertarian bent.

Doesn't help with the tolls the GP is complaining about.

But the roads are nice. You can tell the minute you leave MA.

Effective total state and local taxation on the median household:

New Hampshire (18th): 9.94%

Massachusetts (26th): 10.81%

Seems very similar to me. Maybe we should stick to facts over divisive exaggerations.

Source: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-states-to-be-a-taxpayer...

> Maybe we should stick to facts over divisive exaggerations.

Or we could avoid mischaracterizing lazy math as fact. New Hampshire has no income or sales tax compared to Massachusett's 5% and 6% respectively. New Hampshire has higher property tax, sure, but coupled with the COL disparity you can't honestly say the two are the same.

Furthermore, it's missing GPs point which is that for all the vehicle-related taxes Massachusetts roads are notoriously terrible. New Hampshire's infrastructure ranks much better.

EDIT: I'm also having a lot of trouble finding a source for that 7% figure they have for property tax. Best I can figure is it's around 1-1.5% in MA, 2-2.5% in NH. Also, looks like they based it on a $200,000 house without accounting for the fact that buys a lot more house in NH than MA.

Don't ever move to Europe...just saying you won't like it at all.

Well, if paying for parking (an additional tax in your implication) is unreasonable, then so must be each of those other taxes too? Where do we draw the line?

> Honestly paying for parking is an insult in the first place.

The alternative in popular areas is to never be able to find parking which arguably sucks more. If there aren’t open spots on the street then the parking fees are too cheap.

> Private insurance, which is required. Lots of out-of-state policies aren't eligible, so we see ads on TV for competetive policies from Progressive, Geiko, ect yet nobody in MA is eligible to buy them. It's worth it to note that state vehicles don't need insurance as they are "self-insured." So if you crash into a cop you or your insurance will pay 100% but if a cop crashes into you the town and its taxpayers get to pay 100%.

The taxpayers would be paying for the insurance premiums if the State bought insurance. The ability to be self insured is an advantage of being any large org. It’s no different then self insuring health insurance.

There is a right price for parking in cities, and it's much greater than zero.

https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2014/04/3-enormous-benefit...

You pay so as to not abuse the privilege of using a limited resource. I think that's completely reasonable. You could argue that the other costs of car ownership are too high - that's certainly true in MA.

Do you actually live in MA? There's a lot wrong with what you say.

2) We don't even have to register our cars every year. And you can renew online, so you don't have to sit in the RMV at all. (I did mine a month or two ago.) When you buy a new car the dealer registers it on the spot for you.

3) MA deregulated the the insurance policies a long time ago. Like 10 or more years ago? I can't even remember it was long enough ago. I live in MA and my insurer is.. wait for it. Geico.

4) About the only toll road in the state is the Pike. We have a few bridge tolls. Realistically a bunch of the surrounding states around us have far more tolls. NH has tons of them on roads that many people have to regularly travel. NY has the Thruway. Maine has tolls on the main highways. VT is about the only one around that has less tolls than MA. Anyone complaining about driving in Cambridge is just "doing it wrong". It's super dense and the city is just not set up to support a car-centric lifestyle and they don't want your car there at all.

5) Excise tax reduces to almost nothing unless you constantly flip your car. And that's the town not the state collecting it.

There is a lot of entitlement to think you deserve to park your private car wherever you like.

2) You don't have to re-register every year, but everytime I walk in the door it's more expensive than last time. I go through a lot of vehicles.

3) Fair enough, but I'd still rather have less insurance and I'd like state vehicles to have whatever I have.

4) There are 16 tolls in Boston alone. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/08/22/how-much-will-y...

5) I flip cars all the time, and it's irrelevant. I bought the car with cash, paid to register it, paid the sales tax with cash, pay tax whenever I buy gas, pay tolls whenever I go somwhere... Why does the town need to make money off my car when the state already has 4 times?

You can have metered parking without forcing taxpaying people to pay for it. What if you just made the price for a 2h parking slip $0? You still have meter maids giving out tickets, right? I thought it wasn't about the revenue..... right?

2) Sure we don't get screwed on registration like people in CA do but we still get screwed. People who buy used really get screwed hard because of the taxes on "value" as described.

3) Not really. Most of the cheap, cheap carriers (e.g. "The General") that keep prices of all the carriers low don't exist in this state

4)NH and Maine toll the tourist highways only. I have no problem with them making money off the people who will be the death of their states. Personally I think they should 10x the toll for out of state plates then refund most of it if you cross the border going the other direction. If you have to compare yourself to NY when it comes to cost of living or individual freedom you've already lost. I will agree that nobody with a brain should be driving in Boston/Cambridge.

5) Unless you own a "luxury" brand. I pay under $40 on my 90s crap. My friend pays ~$200 on his same age Town and Country.

>There is a lot of entitlement to think you deserve to park your private car wherever you like.

I think the GP is saying that for all the taking (taxing) MA does the amount of giving back (in the form of services and social programs) MA does is kind of annoying. All these taxes would be one thing if we had good infrastructure but we don't.

Most places have built way more infrastructure than they can afford to maintain. This isn't an MA only problem. This is a nationwide problem.

Likely if you looked at your state/city/county budgets, they are spending more on road construction and maintenance than they are receiving in vehicle related taxes and fees.

>Likely if you looked at your state/city/county budgets, they are spending more on road construction and maintenance than they are receiving in vehicle related taxes and fees.

I can't just look at the budget. That will tell me what they're telling the public they're spending on X. That will not tell me how much of the budget the people allocating the money expect to actually further X and how much they expect to get sapped by unnecessary overhead along the way. A non trivial amount of that is just monopoly money for the politically well connected. There are administrators and managers who are paid a salary to twiddle their thumbs because they know people. There are projects that exist for no reason other than to be a jobs program. You can't tell what's what from the outside. I have immediate family members in state government in MA so it's not like I'm talking out my ass. I get to hear complaints about this multiple times per week.

>VT is about the only one around that has less tolls than MA.

Don't forget Connecticut! Connecticut borders Mass and has no tolls in the entire state. There's been some movement since the election to add tolls though.

> Honestly paying for parking is an insult in the first place.

Why should a city make available public land for private storage for free?

Providing the parking spaces, and the car lanes to drive on, are both massive investments in real estate, given over for your use to store and use your vehicle. The fees and taxes you mention aren't nearly enough to pay for those investments themselves - they are supplemented with funds from property and income taxes. It might not seem like it, but you are getting a very good bargain, especially compared to someone that doesn't own a car.

Parking fines should be for congestion control rather than revenue.

This pays the way for that isnt how budgeting works.

I grew up in MA and was very angry about this, so even when I moved out of state [and am still out of state] I paid attention to this.

It is my understanding that [frmr] Gov. Deval Patrick changed this specific policy somewhere around 2006/7. I distinctly remember writing in a letter [for whatever little that was worth] encouraging him to do so.

Has time in MA been rewound? Is one of us not paying attention?

<rant> So can I retroactively sue the Berkeley municipality? I'm not joking (...okay I am). I've gotten a fucking ticket literally every time I've been in Berkley because they don't keep track of WHO marks your tires or WHERE they fucking mark them. The city also refuses to at all harbor the mere concept of a mistake by their own... </end-rant>

And yes I know I ain't ever getting my money back from the city of Berkeley.

Is there a reason disc parking is not practiced in the US? Seems a lot less work than marking tires or keeping track of license plates. Are there any legal or other issues with it?

I have never seen it in the US. But the only counterpoint I could find seemed appropriate to post here;

https://hackaday.com/2011/10/27/hacked-parking-disc-can-be-c...

Probably some combination of never hearing of such a thing (I just looked it up) and that the whole idea of directly paying for parking / time-limited parking is still offensive to many of us ("just build more parking lots") and doesn't exist in many places. Then after hearing about it an obvious objection is that it puts an extra burden on the driver to manage the thing even when they just want to pop-in/pop-out, and that if the level of abuse is actually a problem we might as well go all the way with a full blown pay-always approach.

They can't chalk your tires but they can get a location trace from your mobile phone just because you were close to the wrong place at the wrong time. Pfft.

Even if this ruling is upheld, parking enforcement will just switch to using photos or license plate readers. At least in an area that uses chalking for enforcement, if your car hasn't been marked, you'll over the time limit but you can't leave immediately, you know you have a little more time. No such luck when you don't know whether your car's license plate # has already been recorded.

On the other hand, imprisoning people for fleeing danger and seeking refuge without the rights we even give other people arrested before trial who are actually accused of a crime, stealing their babies and putting them in cages or giving them away to Christians, all that is totally fine under the 4th ammendment and the rest of the Constitution.

Thank God we live in a free country!

There are two obvious possible solutions to this from the city:

(1) tiny print on the parking signs that says you consent to be chalked, creating an explicit contract

(2) sell the rights to manage the city's parking to a private entity using private contractors to chalk with no prescription on methodology, rendering the "search" non-governmental in nature

Here's a link to the local news story about this topic: https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2019/04/appeals-...

Fixed link: https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2019/04/appeals-...

There was a :wq at the end (too much vim everywhere ;) ).

My hometown uses license plate recognition. To pay for parking we put our license plates into the kiosk. The enforcement person has a gadget with camera instead of expired meters.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19724969

Legally speaking, city could have easily argued that parking space is not a private property and therefore they can easily enforce an agreement to be chalked. I wouldn't like this but the thing is that 4AM cannot be applied if you willingly relocated your private property in to a place that is not owned by you. This is the principle (I think) behind government able to search in whatever way they deem fit at airport because airport is not your private property. If supreme court upholds this then things would become very messy for the government.

> Legally speaking, city could have easily argued that parking space is not a private property and therefore they can easily enforce an agreement to be chalked.

They could perhaps enforce such an agreement, if the agreement existed.

> I wouldn't like this but the thing is that 4AM cannot be applied if you willingly relocated your private property in to a place that is not owned by you.

No, the fourth Amendment doesn't go away on public property, generally.

> This is the principle (I think) behind government able to search in whatever way they deem fit at airport because airport is not your private property.

It's not. A variety of administrative search criteria together with the “grave and urgent” need to prevent hijackings is, and it's not unlimited.

https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/482/482.F2d...

"[T]he Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967) (internal citations omitted) available at https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/389/347.

Seems like there's a simple solution to be found here. Don't put the chalk mark on the car, put it on the city owned street underneath it.

If tire chalking constitutes an unconstitutional seizure, I wonder when we will see followup suits over towing and booting

No, because that only happens when there's reasonable belief that you are breaking a law.

I suspect that this decision will get overturned. People don't have privacy expectations concerning the appearance of tires of their cars. Any member of the general public can come by and chalk your car. No specialized equipment is required. As I recall, that was the deciding factor when the SCOTUS ruled that finding pot-growers with the help of a an infrared camera was unconstitutional.

> People don't have privacy expectations concerning the appearance of tires of their cars.

My privacy expectation is that other people don't touch my car or put marks on any part of it without my permission.

> Any member of the general public can come by and chalk your car.

And they, too, would be doing something illegal.

I don't believe the argument being used here is about expectations of privacy - its in regards to the trespassing of a police officer by interacting directly with your property.

Your car is parked in a public space. A dog could walk by and mark it. No wanting something to happen is quite different from having a reasonable expectation it won't happen.

Kyllo was decided by a narrow 5-4. That case was by far stronger. It involved a person's home, first of all. And as I mentioned, it involved the use of sophisticated equipment not generally possessed by the public. Without the camera, the police would have to enter the house to obtain the same information. One can therefore establish an equivalence between the two acts. In the present case, such equivalence does not exist. The police could conceivably just stare at the car for an hour or two. Chalking is thus only a time saver. It's not a search.

So who is going to create the app that helps cops track how long a vehicle has been present in an area?

Already done in DC. https://twitter.com/howsmydrivingdc?lang=en

So then will they be violating the constitution when they place a ticket under my windshield wipers?

No, because presumbaly that doesn't count as a search, because they are not gathering information by performing the act.

It's also quite possible that this will be overturned. Seems kinda bonkers to me.

Off-topic, but I really like that the website offers a text-only version without tracking.

Definitely not a lawyer, and I know a lot of places are moving to photo enforcement of parking anyway, but it's hard for me to understand why a chalk mark on a tire would be determined an "unreasonable" search by the court.

It really feels like a stretch if you ask me. But since the car is private property, even though it's on a public road, the mark itself is an "action" taken by the police against your property despite not having committed any crime. I'm wondering how many other weird interpretations of this new ruling one could come up with where it would apply to a bunch of other things.

I wonder if they only marked the road, and not the vehicle, if that would be sufficient.

Would a police officer looking at tire tread depth also be considered an illegal search?

Anything in public and in plain sight is considered not a search wrt the 4th. Otherwise, cops could never be eyewitnesses in court.

Not if they had reason to believe that your tires were worn out. The problem is that your tire is being marked when there is no evidence that you will overstay your parking. Everyone is marked indiscriminately. At least, thats how I understood the description.

Ditto. I'm reminded of the practice of police officers touching the tail light at the start of a traffic stop to leave a mark of their presence as later evidence [1]. Is that a search too?

A little colored talcum powder on the wheel seems like such a trivial, short-term intrusion that I just don't see the issue. Those perfume spraying salespeople at department stores routinely do something much more invasive.

[1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/502605/reason-police-officers...

Not a lawyer...but if a cop pulls you over, the default assumption is that there is an "individualized suspicion of wrongdoing" - you would probably have to show that the officer did not have a valid reason for stopping you (e.g. "Driving while black").

Right, they'll have grounds for stopping you, but a search requires additional cause on top of the initial stop. If talcum powder is a "search", then so is that touching.

It seems like a "reasonable" search given that there is individualized suspicion of wrongdoing, and the search is non-intrusive.

The various levels of governments are generally is not permitted “trivial, short-term intrusions”, regardless of the duration or triviality. Specific exceptions are permitted in certain circumstances, which is why (for example) firefighters can smash your windows and run a fire hose through them if you block a fire hydrant.

You're either being overly pedantic or wrong. Why is a traffic stop limited to 20 minutes if the duration never matters? Why are DUI checkpoints?

Edit: I'm well aware that circumstances can generate cause for intrusion, which, if we're going to be that pedantic, also refutes 'governments are generally is not permitted “trivial, short-term intrusions”, regardless of the duration or triviality.'

Traffic stops are not limited to 20 minutes. They are limited to the time reasonably necessary to conclude the traffic stop and either release the driver or, with probable cause, escalate to investigation and/or arrest. Delays of far less than 20 minutes for the purpose of generating probable cause through drug dogs have been found illegal: https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/14/01/131176P.pdf

DUI checkpoints were found by the Supreme Court to be a specific instance of permissible intrusion in service of the public good, as the benefits of the theoretically-impermissible search outweigh the trivial, short-term intrusion: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=...

Both cases clearly indicate that while the trivial, short-term intrusions are normally unacceptable, the public good in each circumstance outweighs the violation of constitutional rights. In the chalking case, the court found no cause sufficient to justify the violation. It seems likely it will be appealed to SCOTUS, which I’m quite looking forward to if they accept it!

I encourage you to look up other such cases; I suspect you’ll find that violations of the general principle against any intrusion, regardless of duration, will be carefully scoped to ensure they cannot be generalized.

>Traffic stops are not limited to 20 minutes. They are limited to the time reasonably necessary to conclude the traffic stop and either release the driver or, with probable cause, escalate to investigation and/or arrest. Delays of far less than 20 minutes for the purpose of generating probable cause through drug dogs have been found illegal:

Yes, I know. I was referring to the valid version of it that references 20 minutes to establish that duration matters in terms of whether the intrusion is justified -- i.e. the charitable interpretation you use to ensure a responsive discussion.

>DUI checkpoints were found by the Supreme Court to be a specific instance of permissible intrusion in service of the public good, as the benefits of the theoretically-impermissible search outweigh the trivial, short-term intrusion

Yep, exactly the argument I was making here.

Again, you're just being pedantic while agreeing with the substance of what I said. That isn't productive.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what issue you have with my initial statement. I looked up the possible meanings of pedantic and received this list from the web:

> overscrupulous, scrupulous, precise, exact, over-exacting, perfectionist, precisionist, punctilious, meticulous, fussy, fastidious, finical, finicky

Each of those words is positive, if not mandatory, when dealing with the law, with the courts, with court judgements, and with the Constitution. Could you be more precise (pedantic, even!) about why taking a 'fastidious' or 'precise' approach to this discussion of constitutional law is inappropriate here?

The 4th amendment requires a warrant for actions that would constitute a trespass at a common law. (Under modern interpretations, a warrant is required for some things that don't constitute a trespass, but most people agree that a warrant is required at least for things that are a trespass.) Chalking your car is a trespass to chattels (personal property) and so requires a warrant.

Is there actual case law about someone being prosecuted for the trespass of putting chalk at the bottom of someone's tire? How about sneezing?

What about leaving a fingerprint on someone's car, which (per my uncle comment) police routinely do without enough evidence for a search, and which ordinary people do all the time?

Sticking a flyer in the windshield?

The Court of Appeals cited the Restatement of Torts (a treatise articulating general principles of common law) for the definition of trespass to chattels:

> In accordance with Jones, the threshold question is whether chalking constitutes common-law trespass upon a constitutionally protected area.Though Jonesdoes not provide clear boundaries for the meaning of common-law trespass, the Restatement offers some assistance. As defined by the Restatement, common-law trespass is “an act which brings [about] intended physical contact with a chattel in the possession of another.” Restatement (Second) of Torts § 217 cmt. e (1965). Moreover, “[a]n actor may . . . commit a trespass by so acting upon a chattel as intentionally to cause it to come in contact with some other object.” Id.Adopting this definition, there has been a trespass in this case because the City made intentional physical contact with Taylor’s vehicle. As the district court properly found, this physical intrusion, regardless of how slight, constitutes common-law trespass. This is so,even though “no damage [is done] at all.” Jones, 565 U.S. at 405 (quoting Entickv. Carrington,95 Eng. Rep. 807, 817 (C.P.1765))

The Restatement explains, in Section 218, that liability for trespass generally requires some sort of injury or deprivation of use. So you can't sue someone just for touching your car. But it also explains in Section 217 that the trespass itself can occur absent injury or dispossession, and that trespass can have legal significance even if it is not directly actionable.

Yes, that's the argument. The challenge was to reconcile that with e.g. the practice of leaving a fingerprint on the tail light when a search would have been illegal.

Edit: toned down.

I'm responding to this point:

> Is there actual case law about someone being prosecuted for the trespass of putting chalk at the bottom of someone's tire? How about sneezing?

> What about leaving a fingerprint on someone's car ... which ordinary people do all the time?

The Court relies on the part of the Restatement that says a trespass has occurred when you intentionally touch someone else's chattel property. That doesn't answer your point, which is why I referred you to Section 218, which explains that a trespass, though it has occurred, is not actionable standing alone absent damages or dispossession. So even though touching someone's car is technically a trespass, it's not an actionable trespass so you wouldn't see lawsuits involving mere touching.

(As to your point about police leaving fingerprints--I've never heard of the practice. But my assessment would be that even though it's trespass, it's not actionable (no damages), and it's not a Fourth Amendment violation because it's not actually part of the search, but merely incidental to it.)

>As to your point about police leaving fingerprints--I've never heard of the practice

Hence the link in the comment I referred to: http://mentalfloss.com/article/502605/reason-police-officers...

>But my assessment would be that even though it's trespass, it's not actionable (no damages), and it's not a Fourth Amendment violation because it's not actually part of the search, but merely incidental to it

But it's done when the officer isn't allowed to (otherwise) search -- before he's had any contact with the driver or even looked inside the car.

You have to think of the causal chain that leads to recovery of evidence. Marking your tire with chalk is part of the causal chain--if the police didn't do it, they wouldn't know you had broken the law. Touching your car during a stop is not part of any causal chain--it's a separate tort that happens to be non-actionable because there is no damages.

Say a police officer stops you for running a red light. At that point, he has no suspicion that would justify a search. I tries to tap on your door to get you to roll down your window, and his ring scratches your car. That is a trespass to chattels, and it's actionable because it has resulted in damage to your car. After you roll down the window, he sees someone snorting cocaine in the back seat. He then searches your car, and recovers tens of kgs of drugs.

Was there an illegal search? No. Even though scratching your car was a trespass, and even though you can still sue for the cost of fixing the scratch, that trespass had nothing to do with recovering the evidence of drug crimes.

I appreciate the analysis of the cocaine detection, and the torts, but the question was about the evidential legality of touching your rear tail light. That was not necessary to conduct the stop and (by supposition) there is insufficient evidence for a search (beyond what he can ordinarily see), etc.

Are you saying that e.g. the cop's fingerprint on the tail light could not be used as evidence, because it was an illegal trespass?

I'm trying to follow this discussion (because it is interesting) and I am a little lost about this fingerprint thing. What does leaving a fingerprint on a taillight accomplish for the officer?

From the link:

>Before cameras were installed on the dashboards of most police cars, tapping the taillight was an inconspicuous way for officers to leave behind evidence of the encounter, according to The Law Dictionary. If something were to happen to the officer during the traffic stop, their interaction with the driver could be traced back to the fingerprints left on the vehicle. This would help other police officers track down a missing member of the force even without video proof of a crime.

Ah, now I understand. Yeah, that's an interesting question.

Ah, okay, I get it now. In that case, I think the cop’s fingerprint could be used as evidence if the cop went missing. Say the cop opened your bag and dug through it without a warrant. That’s clearly a 4th amendment violation. That would result in exclusion of evidence obtained from the search of the bag. But if the cop went missing, fingerprints from the bag would be admissible as evidence of the fact that he had searched the bag and interacted with you. Whether the later search is legal would depend on the specifics of that search.

That seems like a lot of legal language contortions ("chattels", seriously?) to come up with a ridiculous restriction against simply marking a car-tire with chalk to tell if it has been moved recently.

It's actually quite straightforward. In Jones, the Supreme Court held that the 4th amendment protects people from invasions (i.e. trespass) of property rights without a warrant. You have a property right in chattels.[1] (That just means "personal property" as distinguished from "real property." The term is relevant because the rules for what counts as trespass are different between the two.)

A car is chattel property. Chalk-marking a car is a trespass to chattels, because it involves intentionally touching the car without permission. Therefore, under Jones, a warrant is required to chalk-mark a car in the course of investigating whether someone has broken the law (i.e. a search).

[1] The 4th amendment says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated[.]" "Houses" are real property, while "papers, and effects" are chattel property.

Marking a car tire with chalk is a practical technique to assess whether or not a car has moved after some interval of time.

The idea is to tell if someone has been parking for longer than is acceptable in a particular spot. Not a big deal (I assure you the chalk comes right off!). Not the kind of problem that one would think should involve the 4th Amendment.

I guess one's judgement on this depends on whether one thinks laws and the amendments of the constitution are supposed to be taken as absolutely literal and inflexible in their interpretation, with no consideration for practical reality or actual consequences.

Sorry, but I think that's unreasonable here.

It is by itself reasonable to mark tires, since doing so in no way damages the car and is less intrusive than other options law enforcement can constitutionally use (for instance, keeping a photographic record of every second your car was parked, which would not be a trespass, but would be far more intrusive).

But it's unconstitutional to do so, because the principle behind our laws say that law enforcement cannot (without a warrant or exigency) trespass on your property to accomplish its goals, whatever they may be.

The principle here seems sort of superfluous, but it's holding the line against any sort of trespass, some of which you'd probably find less reasonable, such as magnetically attaching a GPS transmitter to the bottom of your car.

    > ...but it's holding the line against any sort of trespass.

I just don't believe that practical solutions to real-world human problems is ever to be more strict, more pure, more rigid, more unwavering in the interpretations of rules(law).

The reasonableness of the search never really comes into factor though because there's no basis for the 'search', no suspicion of wrongdoing, so how minimally invasive it is doesn't matter.

Based on the text of the article, it sounds like the search is "unreasonable" because it is performed against cars that haven't done anything wrong. When they apply the chalk, the car is presumably under the parking limit. It's when they later check on the chalk that the car is over the limit.

When cars are stopped at a DUI checkpoint, the vast majority of the drivers haven't done anything wrong, and there's no reason to suspect any of them have done anything wrong. Nonetheless, such stops have been upheld as "reasonable". From Wikipedia[1],

> The Supreme Court held that Michigan had a "substantial government interest" to advance in stopping drunk driving, and that this technique was rationally related to achieving that goal (though there was some evidence to the contrary). The Court also held that the impact on drivers, such as in delaying them from reaching their destination, was negligible, and that the brief questioning to gain "reasonable suspicion" similarly had a negligible impact on the drivers' Fourth Amendment right from unreasonable search (implying that any more detailed or invasive searches would be treated differently). Applying a balancing test, then, the Court found that the Constitutionality of the search tilted in favor of the government.

Assuming one agrees with that ruling, I'm not seeing how chalking cars isn't a sufficiently minimal "reasonable" search to allow the government to enforce things it has an interest in. (Assuming also that parking enforcement qualifies as a "substantial government interest" — which, IDK, perhaps it doesn't.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Department_of_State_P...

Chalking fails the balancing test because parking enforcement is about generating revenue, not public safety.

I'm not providing a legal opinion, just my view of what it says in the news article.

I have no opinion on the legality. From a practical perspective, I don't see any problem with chalking and I think this is a mistake on the part of the court.

The government interest in controlling parking (which is pretty safe) is MUCH weaker than the interest it holds in stopping drunk driving (which is very dangerous).

The court is willing to give the police more lee-way when the stakes are demonstrably higher.

If every time I go downtown to shop there is no parking available, I'm going to stop going downtown.

This is largely why these time limited parking laws come into play. I think thats enough to put chalk on a tire, if it's also legal to stop people and give them a breathalyzer (one is much more invasive than the other).

No more having to clear parking cookies, at least.

Perhaps they can chalk the curb instead? 'Bracket' the tire(s) with marks on the curb, and a "code" indicating where the valve stem

Better to just ban cars completely.

someone please ELI5: what purpose does the chalking serve , in the parking enforcement ?

Chalk on the tires marks the time the parking officer saw the car. If they come back to that car, they can know it’s been parked there over the time limit.

But infrared pictures of your license plate ran through private corporations databases are not.

The future is grand

Always wondered about this..

..only kidding, of course I didn't. It's silly.

this is a big day for chalk stories on HN

Yep, chalk on your tires violates your rights. But if you are within 100 miles of a border, we can search everything in your car and on your persons no questions ask.

This ruling is bad for 2 reasons.

1. It's an example of unintended consequence. It changes no circumstance (same cop will just be running around snapping pictures), it makes it more costly for the inefficient government. GJ there.

2. You enter into an implicit contract when you voluntarily subject yourself to the statute of the limited parking (the code is on the signage). It's not unreasonable to be tracked for the purposes of enforcement, anymore than providing an ID for a vehicle license.

This appears to be a strawman precedent (bad lawyering) that a higher court will casually reverse (that would be the supreme court).

Next up, breathing on a citizen or observing clothing by a law enforcement officer can be construed as unreasonable via the 4th?

I don't know why you're being downvoted. You raise an important point on the rather uneven application of justice when it comes to the expansion of police powers.

After what, 60 years of chalking tires, the courts decide it is unconstitutional. But the CBP are free to confiscate your phone, and you may be searched on suspicion of harboring illegals. Nearly the entire US population lives within 100 miles of a border (or the coast!) and are subject to warrantless searches by DHS policy. Doesn't seem right.

They're probably being downvoted because no sane person would believe it. Sounds like SovCit tinfoil-battery.

Only trouble is, it is basically true. [1] While arbitrary warrantless search and seizure is in principle still forbidden except at the border crossings themselves, just about anything else the CBP does in its normal course of business is fair game elsewhere in the 100-mile zone. The courts have been reluctant to reign them in for whatever reason.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's not actually true. You can be stopped and questioned about your immigration status, but the CBP still need a warrant or probable cause to search your vehicle. Same as if you were >100 miles away from the border.

You can determine a lot by stopping and asking someone about their immigration status, probably way more than chalk on a tire would.

The car has a unique identifier already. Several of them infact.

I don't see how chalking could have ever been an option on the table. Why do you need to touch someone's car to identify it? A notepad and a pen would suffice, no?

EXAMPLE ST. - 8am

-Green honda AAB-234

-Red Toyota 22F-554

-Blue Land Rover 9JG-532

EXAMPLE ST. - 9am

-Green Honda AAB-234 <- Getting a ticket

-Yellow Nissan BB5-K25 <- New, no ticket

-Blue Land Rover 9JG-532 <- Getting a ticket

I mean it really is that easy and it takes about the same amount of time, perhaps a little more diligence. It's sad that we need to govern for the lowest common denominator. If the civil servants weren't so lazy/disinterested/uneducated this wouldn't have cost the city as much money as it did to resolve.

Try it. See how many plate numbers you can write down in half an hour. (To be fair, you'd need to read and compare those plate numbers too.) Then see how many tires you can mark with chalk on a stick in the same amount of time.

As a taxpayer, I'd rather not pay for the difference in staff.

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