Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
postmediadriving.wordpress.com
postmediadriving.wordpress.com
Not condoning, but here's a (naive?) though experiment if the Barnacle shows up in use again... Park your car and cover it. Many car covers have cable locks to prevent removal and openings to expose plates for legal/bylaw reasons, so this should be permissible. This may provide protection from sun, frost, birdshit, and now Barnacles(tm)! My assumption is that parking enforcers don't have permission to modify, remove, or damage property on a parked car like this.
Of course, there's always a tow-truck. Or you could pay for the parking you use, but I respect the hacker spirit!
The problem I have with parking authorities is fraud. When the meter employee gives me a ticket for a different meter, or when the parking ticket fine is $200 instead of say $30, or when the restrictions are absurd/vague ("You can park here for 2 hours m-f except holidays except 9-11 except in green spots except you have to display the ticket in your window except you need to be 6 inches but not 12 inches from the curb except except except except")...
... then this is the part where I start to suspect I'm not paying for the parking I'm using, but instead I am paying for someone else's large and undeserved profit.
It's like if you were paying for a meal by each minute taken to eat it, then the waiter left your food on the counter for an hour before bringing it over because they were busy, then they charged you for that hour because "it already left the kitchen"
Adding insult to injury caused by their own lack of preparedness.
I’m not paying just for food. I’m paying for the entire dining experience. I also probably have plans after the restaurant that are now delayed or a babysitter waiting at home for me to return. If you not only don’t deliver on a good dining experience but also inconvenience me I should get a refund. In my experience, restaurants generally understand that and I don’t even have to ask for the refund.
Also, it was pouring with rain that night. So they seriously had someone at 3 am, in the pouring rain, shining a flashlight at the license plates of every legally parked car with a valid permit just to try to find an excuse to get people.
We had a guest parking lot where your guests would simply park. No sort of registration, but if the car stayed for 3+ days without notifying management it would be booted.
Now if I want a guest to visit, they have to download an app and enter their credit card info and license plate number for the pleasure. Every time I have a guest over, instead of the normal pleasantries I have to warn them to register their car lest they be ticketed by the overly zealous parking enforcement officers. The process takes around 10 minutes for someone unfamiliar. It is absolutely infuriating, though I blame apartment management more than PayByPhone.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do an AMA somewhere (even in this thread)
1. What do you think about products like SpotHero & others? (Can those comp
2. Do you think parking lots will be an attractive investment in the future? (Autonomous or bet on it for next while)
1. Having left PayByPhone and the parking sector years ago, I don't think I'm one to comment intelligently on current innovators. Quick observation... I still see too much capital being spent on custom, vulnerable, armored, escalating, and gratuitous hardware solutions when simple solutions are already in hand. But that's the classic bias of a naive "software guy" looking at an old-thinking industry, isn't it? :-)
2. re/ parking lots ... Depending on the city, zoning, taxation, and its appetite for redevelopment, a parking lot may be a path for a landowner to pay property taxes and flow a bit of cash while the awaiting the right time to develop it into a new use. The new use may push the same parking, or more, underground. IMO automating parking into something ultradense in urban centres makes sense, but I can understand reluctance to pour capital improvements into land that may change form radically if it's in the path for commercial or residential redevelopment. This is part of the reason we found it easy to sell a low/no-capital solution to parking operators, compared to paystations and hardware solutions. Roaming driverless shared cars that are highly utilized and rarely need to park ... that's an attractive vision, I think. But maybe that starts to look a bit like public transit?
Me, I try to ride my bicycle, walk, and take transit everywhere. :-)
I can't imagine what your life is like...
I once parked at a smart meter, but it wouldn't take my coins. I put a note on the windshield, went inside for a short bit and came out to a missing note replaced by a parking ticket.
I came to realize that the "smart' meter wasn't registering a car in the spot, so it would just eat the coins. I took a video of this and wrote to the parking authority (rejected), then took the video to the parking authority, then finally gave up and paid it. I think I was entitled to a final hearing but I didn't have the time. It was a little like wrestling a pig.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/parking-tickets-bro...
Edit: The university I went to gave me parking tickets twice. Once because I forgot to hang my permit and once .. I have no idea why, but they ticketed everyone in the lot lol. Both times when I stopped by the office they immediately dropped them. Sometimes parking enforcement can be downright reasonable, so I wouldn't necessarily assume the worst of them.
that leaves me... speechless.
It definitely is more civilized and convenient. Great service. Totally happy. You should be proud.
No hate warranted at all! Thank you for your contribution to the world.
You’ve routinely enabled me to park when I didn’t have the change, or avoid standing outside on hot summer days coaxing a semi-functional parking machine to spit out the right ticket.
On one occasion it even helped me pay for my SO’s parking from hundreds of miles away.
First, the people who get "in trouble" are often absolutely brazen in their unfair use of common parking. They're warned multiple times and even when given a "last chance" notice they'll just keep breaking rules.
At that point you have to TOW them. And let me tell you, a TOW is something you can't lampoon or get free internet off of. Towing SUCKS and drivers bend the knee after this happens. I have data to prove it!
Anyhow, another thing about these folks is that they will go so far as to dispute that the vehicle was in fact in violation of whatever parking rule.
They'll say the warnings were not real and the tow reason was definitely not real. They'll tell the business IT needs to pay for the tow. Well, their faces change when confronted with photos and maps and times showing each violation!
It isn't really that funny, but it is a big deal to any facility because some low-level administrator has to face some really pissed off people who will break rules and lie because it has always worked. So it is really important to give them great evidence so there isn't really a discussion needed.
If you want to check out my product, here's the landing page: https://easyalpr.com/products/parking-enforcer
PS: Do you have stats on the overlap between parking violators and people who refuse to pick up after their dogs?
The best ones do, however:
http://heroesinthenight.blogspot.com/2012/08/angle-grinder-m...
"If you think some organizations are bad, wait until you see some of the customers."
But at some point a bad product has to be called a bad product. A deterrent that can't deter anyone, but does less damage than a boot, is still useless, not better.
"Your Honor, that sign on the entrance to the parking lot discussing parking restrictions and enforcement thereof somehow implied that they're giving me this device and authorization to use it how I see fit".
I suppose if someone leaves their wallet on the hood of your car while they're tying their shoelace, they've also authorized you to use their credit cards, right?
- light oil or penetrating oil can be used to bypass the gasket. If it will remove decals or stickers, this thing doesnt stand a chance.
- exploiting the coefficient of expansion for gasses (as these brilliant students did) is absolutely an option.
- keeping your windshield wipers up would prevent use of the device.
- running some 4lb test fishing line taped against your windshield would allow, once placed, the gasket to be defeated by just lifting up on it.
and as always, remember, manufacturers are bound to use a specific set of locks and bolts. Torx security are inexpensive and a barrel lock impression tool is about ten dollars.
disclosure: As an automotive mechanics apprentice, ive had to remove way more tenacious crap from windshields than this thing.
Until the person putting the thing on just raised them.
I love how, when one of these places recruits you, it takes forever to learn what they're about, because their website is nothing but euphemisms.
And it's a pyrhic victory anyway, because chances are now the cars will get one of the metal tire boots put on, or get towed. Both of which are more expensive and a bigger hassle for everybody.
That's the point. The university was crowing about how they deployed 40000 of these things already. They wouldn't be able to tow 40000 people as easily.
Me and my wife had to fight a ticket at one point for a spot we had paid for. No ryme or reason the lot was just grabbing revenue by literally stealing from customers with small tickets that they thought would not be challenged because
- you can have your license revoked for non payment of tickets
- you aren't entitled to a court hearing for a parking ticket so fighting it means figuring out how to handle it yourself or hiring an attorney to fight $30 tickets.
The best model for interactions in capitalism is predator prey wherein virtually no one is actually thinking of the system as a whole and sane conditions are only apparent as an emergent property of adversarial interactions.
I went to a university that has no shortage of land to expand to. This meant that they have a couple of very large parking lots for on-campus students and some large commuter parking lots. If you didn't mind walking, parking was easy to come by. Those that complained about a 10 minute walk thought there was no parking. Funny thing was that it was easy to cross all of campus in less that 15 minutes. Really is a matter of perspective, I suppose.
After a few months of no enforcement and letting the students get used to parking like this, then they'll crack down with brutal enforcement. I'm talking about them sniping you a few minutes after you walk away. Every year they'd reset and do the same thing over again to get some fresh meat.
Entrapment is the state coercing someone to do something they would not do under normal circumstances. It sounds to me as if these people are illegally parking under normal circumstances. The rules about curbs, hydrants, driveways, &c are well known and common enough between every state that there is no excuse that they weren't aware this was illegal.
It's still highly unethical, especially when your target population is supposedly already paying tens of thousands for use of the facilities.
City streets are not the campus facilities, and what of the people using public transit or other means of transportation? Should they have to pay additional on their tens of thousands to subsidize those people with cars?
They aren't the law either any more than Jimmy's Pizza place is when the call to tow a car that was abandoned for a week.
They made the parking rules unclear and never enforced them then cracked down brutally.
Most places do not make the rules unclear and many rules brought up in the subthread, e.g. hydrants and parking near an intersection, are well known and common among the states.
Look, I'm not saying that basically giving everyone a month with no warnings and then going out in force isn't a crappy thing to do. I'm just saying that that's not entrapment, nor is an an awful thing for the police to do, even if there are nicer ways to do it, e.g. giving notices on windshields for the first week of the semester and afterwards being issuing tickets.
The argument that it’s immoral to deal with people breaking the law because their used to getting away with it is absurd.
The sense of entitlement is absurd. If you park illegally you’ll get a fine, deal with it.
I can understand this problem if you're serving a lot of nontraditional students who already have households, but not with 18-22 year old full time students.
There's also a community college that serves a lot of commuting students, and has none of its own housing.
The regional colleges have more commuter students, since you can save a boatload of money by living at home, but also probably don't have such severe parking problems -- land is cheaper.
In the UK parking at NHS hospitals is a lucrative revenue stream for parking companies - they toss the NHS a few pennies to justify it but it’s exploitation of those in an emotional state, such as visiting a very sick relative, or even picking up someone to take home. Any techniques developed to defeat those parasites is a public good.
I couldn't be more proud.
Although there is one thing that you can’t teach or learn which is having common sense or the ability to apply theories in practice.
Of course, I dont think college needs to be on the "life-crippling debt" scale of payment for this to work.
Likewise, putting the police-department's SIM in your phone has some pretty clear downsides.
My guess was that the university couldn’t really enforce its paper tickets because they weren’t real police, so they resorted to boots and barnacles.
Of course, since it was in London, the only student I ever met with a car had a serious physical disability.
Or businesses in general with trespass law?
I hate parking fees as much as the next person, and totally appreciate the creativity of the people who defeated this device.
However, how should we handle distributing a limited number of parking spaces when there are more people who want to park than available spaces?
If we just say "free to park anywhere!", then there is a good chance you come to school and can't park anywhere (especially if you are not there super early)
You could do a lottery, I guess, but then people who don't need parking might enter the lottery and then sell their spot... making parking even more expensive.
Parking fees seem like a fair way to distribute the limited resource.
If you have high fees, you’d be just transferring the scare resource to the rich. And the people who can’t afford it are forced to figure something less convenient out.
First come, first served works fine if you all start at the same time but I found you're often at the mercy of timetabling.
It also means you can't plan effectively. If half the time, you show up to class and can't park anywhere, how can you make it to class on time consistently?
If your answer is "well, maybe you should take public transportation instead of driving", how is that any better for students than charging for parking?
If you charge for parking, you are at least giving students a choice and the ability to make an informed decision: "is it better to drive and pay $x to park, or save money and take public transportation?"
If you have free parking that is often full, your choice is "take public transportation or have a x% chance of not being able to park and missing class"
It's not like the number of students who need to park is unknown.
If you know there's 1000 students who need to park and only 500 parking spots for them, randomly charging half of them exorbitant fines does not seem like a good solution.
How do we encourage the people who can walk or ride a bike to school to do that instead of drive? By charging for parking.
Also, not sure where you get the "charge half of them at random a large fine" bit from... they are fining people who park without buying a permit, not randomly.
Alternatively, run public transportation that doesn't suck.
Why should non-driving students subsidize driving students?
Also, the school is not in charge of public transportation.
Obviously not... some schools might provide some of those things, but all schools will draw the line somewhere (I don't know of any schools that provide clothing)
Why is it anymore of a slippery slope to say "the college won't subsidize student parking" than "the college won't subsidize student clothing"?
Colleges that are more prestigious in a given field should be able to command a higher tuition, which helps pay for faculty, buildings, and equipment. But the higher rate needs to be justified by the school on their estimated costs and future earnings reports. Banks could take all of this into account when deciding whether to grant a loan to a student.
And yes, the school shouldn't be forcing students to pay for athletics, theatre, etc. Athletics often pay for themselves through advertising agreements and merch, so I don't see why anything should be taken from tuition for that (and I don't think it is most of the time).
So yes, education expenses should be ala carte as much as possible, and I think this (and ending federally backed student loans) would result in drastically reduced tuition prices on average as students see what value they're really getting.
Also, schools frequently are in charge of public transportation in the form of shuttles, buses, safe rides, etc.
Regarding subsidies, yes everyone should pay because it's a community and that's how communities maintain large collections of shared infrastructure equitably. Spreading the costs over a large group keeps them down for the individual users. Also, you can extend that logic infinitely. Why did I have to pay for football fields I never got to play on? Why did I have to pay for performing arts theaters I never used? Why did I have to pay for community facilities that weren't targeted towards my race or religion? Why did I have to pay for expensive research labs in departments other than mine? If you abandon the community model then everyone ends up getting slammed with highly variable usury taxes that they may not be able to pay.
> As of March 2019, our statistical data indicates that the median construction cost for a new parking structure is $21,500 per space
>for a new parking structure is $21,500 per
That only leaves 8500 to cover land charges, maintenance, and any other costs involved (fitting barriers, terminals, paying for electric) to come in at $30k, so perhaps the cost of pricing a place isn't "much lower".
The uni I went to had a decent bus system that had routes along the major apt complexes (private and uni owner). Buses were usually on time, and likely faster than trying to find a parking spot.
Europe is full of two-wheeled vehicles that manage to solve this problem.
It's fundamentally about policy. Take the steps, and you'll get the results.
Make the parking lots more efficiently packed, expand a bit of parking into grassy areas, build a parking garage instead of spending more on sports, there are lots of solutions here.
That cavalier attitude cannot be adopted by the estimated 300M refugees climate change is projected to create over the next few decades.
By all means, have some space for parking. And then charge market rate for it at peak hours, with free transit/shuttle passes for students.
Also: Great, you've got the students covered. What about the faculty and staff? They just have to pay "market rate" for the privilege of parking at their own damn jobs?
(Full disclosure: I work on a rural college campus, where there are chronic problems with parking, and an administration that cares far more about the campus being beautiful than about whether its staff can park within 20 minutes' walk of their job.)
- Half an hour
- Uphill most of the way (the college is built on the side of a hill)
- In the winter when there's 4 inches of snow on the ground, and the temperature is below 0°F
- And then having to start your job making only a few dollars an hour more than the students who get to sit there and do their homework while on-shift, and having to do parts of two other people's jobs too because turnover is so high
The beauty becomes a background after a while...and yes, as you can see, the college does have other problems that make the parking issue seem much less significant. (I'm fortunate enough that the job I was describing was not mine, but it's not only real, it's far from unique here.)
As a student who attends a university that traditionally is considered rural (VT has grown significantly in the past decade, much more than the surrounding towns so I don't know how "rural" we are any more), we struggle with the parking issue as well. This is exacerbated by the housing issue however that's besides the point.
Teachers obviously should get priority with parking and with rate exemption unless there is some exceptional public transportation alternative. If teachers could get by without driving to the school that would be awesome however it obviously isn't feasible since you are permanent residents and likely live further away from campus than students since you can more likely afford the beautiful rural properties.
I could see something like teacher parking sections working well if they were allocated based on need in an area and parking spots converted to also allow student parking when the need for teacher parking was low. Depending on how it's done it could be somewhat complex and require some getting used to however time based zoned parking has worked reasonably well for city residents and I couldn't see it being too difficult to adapt to rural environments.
Our campus has gotten parking decently under control recently excluding the issues due to overcrowding. The things that helped were the free bus system allowing students to use that instead of parking on campus or parking away and taking the bus to campus, those infuriating ride scooters also allowed students to park further away making space for teachers, and the teacher parking spots which convert to generic parking after hours.
We have a lot to improve here but things are at least workable considering our situation. Also this is definitely more apt for a larger college town and I recognise it may not apply to a smaller one however there has to be an analogue that can work for small rural campuses.
Yes? Why wouldn't they? At the office where I work, yeah if you want a spot in the parking garage, everyone pays. My company has free space for bikes, and they do give people a 'commute allowance' which you could certainly use for that parking if you want. Other people just use the money for public transport, or other random things.
Personally I'm open to compromise, but your attitude of treating having to pay for 100 sq ft of permanent storage at your work as some sort of atrocity is pretty weird to me.
edit: apparently it's a lot more than 100 sq ft
> The average size of a parking space is 320 square feet. Another common size is 270 square feet. These sizes include the landscaping or end of aisle areas, the circulation areas and the parking space. For perpendicular or angled parking spaces, the length is commonly 16 feet to 18 feet. Meanwhile, the standard width is 7.9 feet to 9 feet.
https://franklinst.com/about-us/newsroom/news-details/2019/0...
Both lifestyles win out because this isn't trying to eliminate the rural lifestyle, it instead is setting the incentives so that people can and will use the transportation medium most efficient for their lifestyle and distributing the population between different channels of transportation to keep from over-saturating any one of them.
At Georgia Tech there was a bus that ran once every 15 minutes to the subway, and even then you couldn't get everywhere on campus from that bus, you had to take another bus, leading to 20+ minutes of transfers to get anywhere. Bus shelters were mostly nonexistent in winters that featured frequent high winds and rain. Taking the bus was such a miserable experience I ended up skateboarding everywhere, which at least kept me warm.
If the community collectively believe paying-with-time is the best way to allocate resources, charging parking fee is nothing more than money-grabbing.
Almost always free, as you approach parking capacity price increases. You could probably also set up a system to text people who have been there more than X hours that they will start to be charged due to high capacity.
Your plan is to have pricing that is not knowable in advance, and assess it against the students retroactively?
I'm not sure it's possible to come up with a worse plan.
If the goal is to make sure there's always a spot available while having the lowest possible price to guarantee that then I think variable pricing based on capacity is better.
How do you think parking prices are set? They set a price that results in the parking lot mostly full most of the time. They even vary prices by time of day, sometimes.
Also, school parking usage is pretty predictable. Students are parked there while they go to class. Are you expecting them to leave class if parking gets too expensive?
I'd suspect that the goal may be generating maximum revenue rather than capacity at lowest price though. If the goal was variable pricing so you get a spot at lowest price (free when possible) then I'd be happy with that.
You could have an upper bound price per lot if you wanted people to know what they might have to pay worst case, but uncapped would be interesting if you want there to always be a spot available.
Doesn't seem unreasonable for universities with very high tuitions, to provide amenities like reliably available parking.
Does the school offer paid parking permits?
If so, why should students who don't need a parking spot (for whatever reason) need to subsidize those who do?
The high overall cost of tuition is a separate issue, and not one that can be solved by including even more services in the price.
- school buses and the like
- sporting equipment and facilities
- library
There's lots of services that schools provide, and charge everyone for, because they think it's good for the student body as a while.
Maybe a more controversial one... a school that supplies free transit to/from the local night scene, so that people don't drive to/from bars while intoxicated. It's better for everyone, including locals, for this to exist. However, the non-drinkers, the ones who are nowhere near the night scene, get no benefit from it; they pay for it anyways. And a lot of people would say that's good, and a lot would say it's bad.
Not useful to people that live on campus and don't need to travel off-site much.
> sporting equipment and facilities
Completely useless to a lot of people. I used the swimming pool in college exactly once, during the swimming class/test. I certainly didn't use the sports fields. I used the bowling alleys, but those were paid-to-use and not covered by the sports fee we had to pay.
> library
I certainly got a lot of benefit out of this. However, with the internet nowadays, I'm not sure I would if I was in school.
The point being, for many school services, everyone pays for them while only some people get a benefit. The scale of "some people" that benefit varies, but the concept doesn't.
For me Library was a primary place to work (prepaid heat and light!), and access books that couldn't be used online or cost too much to have a private copy (or for which it was more economic not to get one, like you only needed it for a day/week) - but that was a while back. I can't really see even the majority of course books being online though, maybe I'm wrong?
Does the school also pay for public transportation for people who don't drive? Or the extra housing costs of the people who pay extra to live close enough to walk?
Frequently enough, yes, it does.
The University of Michigan runs free shuttles from central campus to north campus. They don't check student IDs either, anyone can ride them.
Your own temporary rental space of ~8*12 feet is a luxury. Riding on a bus or bike is not. The latter options should be accommodated with low or non-existent fees.
This new fitness building is just spreading the cost of athletics to people who don’t use it.
The new wheelchair ramps are just spreading the cost of being handicapped to people who don’t use it.
You could apply that logic to all of a college (or life, if you count taxes and insurance) experience. Not everybody is going to use it, but the cost is spread to not disproportionally applied to a single demographic.
A new engineering building would be an investment, it's expected to increase future returns
If for various reasons on campus housing and public transport are unavailable then parking can be a forced option
Ideally, each student would receive value from the university roughly relative to the tuition they pay, and things that are completely optional should be charged for separately. I think it's reasonable to charge separately for:
- cafeterias - housing - tickets to performances
Why should parking be treated separately? Providing parking for free just encourages more parking, which means more pressure to create more parking, etc. Charging for it separately encourages more efficient commutes, whether by bus, bike, walking, or carpooling.
The same goes for cities and other areas with limited resources. Charging for those limited resources encourages more efficient use of those resources, as well as alternatives. Parking is merely one solution to transportation, why should we subsidize it over others?
That said I'm not sure how much those nudges matter when people need to get to class, and they might already have a schedule too busy to coordinate car pooling, and maybe their town or city doesn't have very good public transit. All of those things applied to me when I was going to college. I just parked in the closest residential neighborhood, which should probably be seen as a negative side effect of charging students for parking on campus.
So the school expected us to pay more than ever for parking because they wanted to monetize their lot and they didn't even price it high enough to make parking possible for those who could afford to pay. They also did and do charge students to park at night, despite the fact that night classes don't come close to filling the lots.
I'm not much of a stick-it-to-the-man type, but you can bet I found all kinds of creative ways to park and get out of tickets.
Also, if everyone came earlier in order to get a parking spot, there would still be no spots, because everyone came earlier.
Parking spots (and their demand) are a time constrained resource, so arriving earlier than you need to, even if practical, increases overall demand.
Think about it, if you arrive for a 10am class at 9am, you're now taking up a spot that someone who has class at 9am could be using. You've essentially wasted an hour's use of a limited resource, before you even factor in your personal opportunity cost.
I'm sick of universities not being subject to market forces. Student-aid reform did so much more harm than good, even before you consider student debt. This is just one of the many unintended consequences.
1. Place dorm rooms nearby
2. Subsidize local public transport companies
3. Build more parking spots
4. Offer more content for students to watch at home
5. Take in less students if you don’t have the capacity
6. Organized ride sharing programs.
7. Off-campus parking with bus services
For the small amount of parking they did provide, they charged a fee for. I think that is a reasonable way of dealing with the limited resource. Make it so you dont need it as much as possible, charge some to the people who decide to use it anyway.
Presumably most students are living on or not too far from campus. What should be done to get more of them to use transportation options that don't involve driving to and parking on campus?
Unless the university owns all land within 10 miles of Great St Mary's Church Cambridge University has it horribly wrong.
If you have free parking, students will drive 5 blocks to go to school, is because why not? It is free and faster and easier.
If you charge for parking, many will walk or ride a bike or take a bus.
However, how should we handle distributing a limited number of parking spaces when there are more people who want to park than available spaces?
This isn't a parking problem. At its root, this is a personal transportation,public transportation and/or cultural issue. Demand for numerous things are increasingly, but supply is effectively static. That is, for example, parking decks are expensive.
It's probably not possible to solve this as a parking problem But zoom back, dig for the roots and perhaps sone behaviors can be changed, and some cultural progress made?
fwiw, last year I read Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
He makes the case, numerous time for rethinking the approach to problem like this.
https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Busi...
Paying for parking isn't a "fair" way to distribute it. What is meant to happen is that paying for it funds the creation of more parking (ground level parks are converted to multistories etc). So paying is a necessary evil to create and maintain enough of something to go around.
With a monopoly supplier, like here, that doesn't happen as they can just pocket the cash. They may actually cut the supply as charging 20% fewer people twice the price is more money for them.
By regulating the correct resource: the issue isn't too few parking places, it's too many cars. London basically fixed this: put the fee on the car.
Except in the (very significant, and needs to be considered) case of disability... By walking between close-together classes, and bicycling or taking buses whenever longer distances need to be covered?
This just sounds so alien to me... If I can't bring my gigantic metal box and engine with me, how am I supposed to get places?
I don't see why students who don't use parking should subsidise those that do. Driving is a preference and is absolutely not mandatory, so it should be paid for separately.
When parking isnt a limited resource and students are already paying large amounts of money to attend a rural campus that has poor public transit options what then? For me at the time it really just enforced the idea that college is more of a bussiness then it is actually concerned with education
I live near a Big Ten university that's on an urban campus, so there's a lot of demand for parking in the area. It's a residential college, but with a lot of employees and grad students. So parking is at a premium.
Faculty / staff parking is priced by convenience. The best spots cost the most.
There's a relatively cheap lot at the edge of campus that's served by a shuttle bus. The city bus service is free for employees and students. And the town is relatively bike friendly. I ride my bike to work. One friend of mine keeps a bike on the back of his car and uses it for "last mile" to avoid paying for the expensive parking.
The places where I went to college and graduate school, parking and housing were both cheaper, but land was also cheaper.
https://twitter.com/saallyjohnsonn/status/121719070339206758...
Yes, something something deterrence. Again, in reality, the article explains how that played out.
Proper law enforcement isn't cheap, and if it is a profit center, you don't have peace officers, you have highwaymen.
Over here,I've never seen boots, barnacles or any such devices. Refusing to pay your ticket is just like not paying your bills. They'll send a reminder bill to your home address a few times,just in case you have forgotten or misplaced the bill/ticket, then it's over to some company that specializes in getting people to pay unpaid bills, and eventually if you still refuse you end up in court and the government makes you pay one way or another.
"No Parking Fees EVER!"
Know someone that got a master's degree from the comfort of his own living room for under $10K and is now earning a decent six-digit salary.
I’m sure the defrost trick works in winter, but it won’t work as well in summer.
One of the OU pictures in the article shows indoor parking.
I’m the wacko that leaves the windows open a crack if it’s sunny enough and not going to rain.
Not all heroes wear capes.
+1
Taking up spaces with abandoned cars is a particularly miserable thing to do that makes the original underlying problem worse!
driving to college is not something you have to do. it's something you choose to do. parking is a side effect of driving, not a god-given right.
It seems like you are suggesting that some people have other choices than driving. There are a lot of colleges with no accessible public transportation infrastructure.
Many people don’t have the financial means to do anything else, especially when there isn’t the public transportation infrastructure to support them.
If there's truly no choice other than driving (which isn't really possible, because if driving alone is an option then so is carpooling), your income level has nothing to do with it. If there is a choice, then low income is not a reason to drive.
I was a low income college student who drove and public transportation was not an option for me. Outside of very large cities public transportation is often inefficient to the point that the logistics of attending college and having a job just don't work. Between my part time job and classes I wouldn't have made it to either on time if I took a bus. I sometimes carpooled, but I only knew a few people at the college and work/class schedules didn't often align enough to make ride sharing a possibility. So I bought a very crappy car and basically prayed to the gods every time I used it that it wouldn't break down. It wasn't ideal of course, but being poor never is.
And I was lucky. So many people have problems and commitments that make this situation a lot more difficult, like having a kid. Can you imagine relying on a slow public transportation system while also juggling school, a job, and child care? I can't.
I've seen a lot of these type of comments on HN and my takeaway is that an awful lot of us are totally oblivious to the realities of living in poverty. Although maybe the real takeaway should be that people in general are often bad at viewing the world from any perspective other than their own. I really wish people could be more understanding.
At the low end it is not really that expensive.
Initial buy in is like $1500, $1k for the shitbox, $500 for the paperwork you need to legally operate it.
Fuel isn't exactly cheap but it's not a lump sum so if you're poor you can manage.
Maintenance is solved by bringing beer and pizza to someone who does that stuff on the side (for any instance where the upper middle class would shell out hundreds for a licensed professional this is the solution the lower classes usually have). If something really catastrophic happens you get another shitbox and are late on your other bills.
Unless you live somewhere where public transit is both decent quality and cheap and parking routinely costs money then driving is often cheaper than public transit.
I’ve had cheap cars before and solidly subscribe to the Sam Vines boot theory: unless you can do all of your own maintenance, it’s more expensive long-term but the only option for someone who can’t swing the higher up-front costs. Around here (DC) this is often cited as a poverty factor in favor of better transit since these costs all add up and the many low-paying jobs require hours and/or locations which aren’t great for the limited transit options (e.g. if you work at a restaurant you leave around when the rail is shut down but the bus takes 90 minutes and driving means a ton of upfront costs plus $$$ parking).
but go on...
this is generalization at the next level.
Anecdotally, when I was in university, I saw parking fees for the spot that I paid for in my first semester go from $180 for the semester (13 weeks) to $600/semester in my 4th year. I think parking tends to be a bit of an issue at many universities across north america.
PS: I took the ten year professional student plan between working at Stanford for a couple years and consulting. I had half of my courses canceled in 2000 when they couldn't find lecturers because most were out making $250-500k in industry.
Yes but not a parking service. If you want to park, arrange that yourself somewhere else, like a private garage.
It would be unavailable to students who actually need it.
There's no way in a million years I could have afforded my own car as a student.
This sidesteps the underlying decision of who pays for those garages. Either you charge for parking and the people who use it pay, or you don't and every student (even the ones who take the bus or carpool) pay.
The point of DeCSS and qrpff, for instance, was not that piracy is a good thing but that DRM is a bad thing.
Everything else is about people trying to avoid being asked to take responsibility for the impact of doing that.
Also, what exactly would taking responsibility entail? How can individuals build public transit any more than they can redesign the movie industry? Holding individuals responsible for their single car's pollution sounds like holding then responsible for their plastic straws while ignoring the impact of major corporations on pollution.
I'm just sure it doesn't involve:
- failing to follow parking rules which you presumably agreed to when you matriculated
- refusing to pay charges and fines you presumably agreed to
- vandalism
- theft
- dumping of cars
- squatting on parking spaces
(Even squatting on parking spaces doesn't show a lack of responsibility for the impact of parking spaces occupying land - it's a calculated use of a small amount of a resource in order to aim for more of that resource in the future. You may as well say that someone who invests their money instead of keeping it safely buried in the ground isn't being responsible with their money.)
Of course people cheer fucking with that
Sure, it's a fun example how simple tricks can beat complicated devices, but this only benefits the people who willfully take up valuable parking space that others might want.
It's only a matter of time before the university will switch back to the boot, risking more damage to everybody's cars, or to good old towing, dragging up the price of getting your car back.
Everybody loses because of a few childish students showing off how they're so much smarter than the system.
"Those dang kids! Stay off my lawn!"
For instance, implementation details of devices being leaked are a surefire way of obviating any mitigatory measure employed to coerce cooperation out of an uninformed population.
The irony of this happening at a University, an Institution centered around equipping people with the tools they need to overcome information asymmetry, is not lost on me.
You can't easily prevent the the entry of sharp, thin blades between the device's case and the vehicle glass. You will never get a good enough fit on all shapes of windshield.
The kinds of contraptions I can think of that could guard the gap between the device's case and the glass could be damaging to the glass (for instance, spring-loaded steel plates around the perimeter of the device, perpendicular to the glass).
What would work would be putting a large sticker on the glass, which is cross-hatched by numerous cuts so that it has to be peeled off in half-centimeter-sized slivers.
Instead of a fine, you get a notice with a phone number: for a $180 fee and an hour or two, a sticker specialist will painstakingly peel everything off. You are under no obligation to use that service, but if your car is not out of there by a certain time, it will be towed.
I.e. nobody has any shortcut to get the thing off; it's as hard for them as for you.
This thing is also probably sold to organizations that don’t want to deal with the logistics of supporting boots, but are still interested in holding cars for ransom. So a traditional boot design may have always been a nonstarter for them, but this device isn’t.
"but our fave low-tech workaround was shared by a user who found out his campus only had 12 wheel boots to go around and bought and illegally parked 12 scrapyard cars that could be “sacrificed” so everyone else could park however they wanted."
https://www.removeddit.com/r/specializedtools/comments/e541r...
But nevertheless the students should pay the fine for parking if they wish to park their car in the parking space that requires payment. If the fee is too much then they should file a public complaint with the owner of the parking lot.
But they all laughed at my dystopian future of crooks running around demanding ransoms to remove their suction hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LisjVE1djt8
Modifying the car to drive backwards
Kinda like having to pay for parking when you already are paying hefty taxes. Neat hack, tho
They're acting as an enforcement agency without any oversight. They're modifying property and holding it hostage. It's amazing how a company tries to apply ownership towards something they modify on someone else's property. I don't have an issue with reporting an unpaid debt over fines. However you can't exactly fence off someone's house and hold them hostage because of a disagreement.
> After “receiving feedback from the community” – that is, having its new parking enforcement method thwarted – OU has decided to pause the trial use of the five devices it’d borrowed from the Barnacle’s manufacturer.
so I would guess it has to do more with aggressive sales tactics