Hacker News Reader

Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

Bill my license plate. That is the UX I want.

I think that introduces some problems:

- who should have access to the database linking license plates to addresses?

- what about people with vehicles other countries? Less of a problem in North America, but I recently was in Canada, and saw some vehicles with German number plates!

- what about false number plates? Or misreads? How does one defend against them?

For the last one - a hilarious example: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-58959930

Some parkings here have a terminal where you enter your license plate and pay right before you are about to leave. Time of entry was registered automatically by scanning your plate. Once you’ve paid you got 15 mins to get out of the gate, again controlled by plate scanning.

Solves all the problems you’ve listed.

The airports near me use the toll RFID tags as an option. I wish most pay parking would be able to bill through it as well. It seems to have a low enough rate of false positives.

A newer parking house in Oslo has this as one of the options for billing. Do nothing and this happens.

(Road tolls already do this in Norway.)

I vacationed in Norway in July. Have yet to receive any bills from my trips on ferries and highways. My car had Swedish registration plates. I don't know whether to expect any bills any more.

I got the road toll summary from 2022 by may 2023 or something like that. Pay to Swedish bank like a normal bill, so pretty easy.

Oh ok! Then I need to be patient, I guess

I think I might be mistaken about the timing, but anyhow it was much later than I expected. :)

That’s working out great in New York.

They timed the release of photo-rolling with a few years worth of defective, delaminating license plates, and many people deface or bend the plates.

This is actually how New England handles toll roads. (Not parking.)

You have to write a law with it that says "rental car company's can't charge a junk fee of $25/day" or whatever. (Which is roughly what we were charged the last time we accidentally — there wasn't a toll booth! — took a rental through a toll. $25 from the rental car company for a $1 toll. We own an EZ pass now to avoid this very problem.)

You have to be careful with that, as EZPass will fine you for not pre-registering your tag and plate.

We usually do that, specifically to avoid any chance that the rental company might get billed.

(For those unfamiliar, the EZPass is associated with a set of plates. You can register a rental car against your account during the term of your rental, which helps ensure the charges go to the right place, if the EZPass itself fails to register during the drive.)

There used to be systems whereby consumers could get all kinds of services and just have them billed to their phone account. I don't know how broad or widespread this was, but certainly there were pay-per-call services and such. Unfortunately, the scammers ruined this model, because it was far too easy to force or fake consent over a voice telephone line, and many laws and regulations later, I hardly ever hear of this practice at all.

P.S. my parents became the victims of a phone sex line. They had been receiving mysterious hangup calls in the middle of the night on a regular basis. Then my aunt was planning a trip and dialing a lot of airline (800) numbers, and she accidentally dialed (800) + my parents' number, and got an earful, and so thus my parents found out what all the callers were after.

I don't think you do, not when you get the bill and it's for way more than you would have agreed to.

Hell no. Having a plate stolen and then having to prove you weren't in a certain place is sometimes near impossible.

That's how it works in Scandinavia.

Best hope nobody steals your car, then.

Cant you then declare your car stolen and you get notified your car is here ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com