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Comment by etskinner | Hacker News Reader

How does that fix the issue where someone is on a week-long vacation? Seems like a letter a few weeks in advance is they least they could do.

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In many large cities, there's shorter-than-a-week minimum notices for street closures. For example in DC, no-parking permits have to be posted at least 72 hours in advance.

If you are going out of town for longer than that amount of time, you either need to find somewhere you can pay to park your car, or you need to get a neighbor or friend to check in on it periodically and move it if there's a sign.

This responsibility is the only cost of using public space to store your car, aside from a nominal annual vehicle registration fee. Seems fair to me.

Most big cities have the shorter notice periods because they also generally have maximum parking time limits. In Seattle, for instance, you have to move your car every 72 hours if you're parked on the street.

Is it enforced? No. But technically, it's there.

> Is it enforced? No. But technically, it's there.

Very much enforced in NYC - where they do around $600 million a year in parking tickets.

I would argue that most of those 600 million are not "parked for too long in one place", which is what I said is not enforced.

The vast majority of them are likely the ones that can be verified on the spot -- things like being parked in a no parking zone (whether street cleaning or regular), expired or hasn't paid parking, etc.

Yes. That is correct.

NYC has alternate side of the street parking on most streets which means that for a two hour period, typically midday, on Mon/Thu or Tue/Fri. This has the effect of making you move your car every 72 hours, and it is trivially enforceable. Additionally there are 1 & 2 hour spots which are typically metered.

> Is it enforced? No. But technically, it's there.

In California we have the same law, and it is certainly enforced, usually at the behest of nosy neighbors who have nothing else to do.

It's probably the same here -- it's enforced extremely selectively and only because they're tired of getting the complaint for the dozenth time.

To verify, they usually have to mark your tires to check you haven't moved the car in the 72 hours (you could've just parked in the same place), so it usually requires two outcalls to even issue a ticket. That's a lot of work when you're anywhere outside of the downtown core where that initial call could be done as part of other work.

The "improper parking on a private space" example in the story a few posts up strongly suggests that the car was parked in their own driveway. And yet the car was towed and impounded.

Even in the event of a street closure, I expect that a car parked on my own driveway is fine. And since I'm not using public space to store it, your "public space to store your car" comment is not applicable.

The filming crew towed the cars to a school's parking lot. When the school opened the cars were towed and impounded.

Thanks for the correction.

I understand how that happened, but wow. I hope that the filming crew was forced to pay for this.

A lot of cities require that the city tows the car, rather than the filming crew. Exactly to avoid this kind of problem.

This is correct. My neighbour had some of their cars parked in their driveway on their own property.

Film crew moved all of their cars off of their own property down to the school.

Once school opened up, they were now “improperly parked” (by the film crew) and fines were issued and one of the cars was impounded.

I took it to mean it was improperly parked at the school.

In NYC you generally have to move your car twice a week due to street cleaning. No way you could park for weeks without issue.

That is also commonplace.

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