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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

The loserboard I'd be interested in is which license plates consistently receive the most tickets.

I'd guess the top spots are just super wealthy people who figure that at their "hourly rate", paying for parking is basically more costly than just eating the tickets. Like if someone's time is worth $10k+/hour, the parking tickets are basically just premium parking fees that are still "cheaper" than spending even a minute dealing with payment... Let your assistant pay whatever tickets you get in the mail instead.

This was our old CFO.

He would park directly in front of our office building that was located inside a large complex that had a movie theater, fancy restaurants, and all kinda stuffs like that.

They couldnt tow so they would just write a ticket for being in the spot after like 60 minutes. He racked up thousands in tickets and simply just didnt pay them. Never got in trouble either lol. Since it was private property, I guess the owners just didnt care that much. He was a super douche and ended up quitting thankfully.

They are definitely people who live in their cars and don’t pay the tickets.

EDIT: did a search to see if anyone had analyzed this and here’s reporting that shows basically this. None of the top cars are remotely luxury, eg.

https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/15/parking-tickets-san-franci...

Good point. I wonder if it might be a bimodal distribution - peaks for the super poor and the super wealthy. Of course, there are more poor than wealthy, so maybe you'd need to look at the rate per capita for different income brackets.

Maybe but honestly your logic doesn’t really make any sense to me anyway. If my time is worth $10k/hr, why am I driving myself? That alone is a huge waste of money.

My only knowledge of significant parking ticket acquisition from upper classes comes from lawyers outside courthouses. I tried looking for reporting on this but it may have just been a hyper local thing to where I grew up.

Could be family, I knew the daughter of a wealthy man who used to park wherever she liked and would pay the tickets without a second thought. I never asked her about it, but given what I remember of her (very personable and naive) she probably didn't see it as a problem, she just paid them and that was it.

This is the insight behind demand-driven parking fees. The super wealthy folks who can pay an infinite amount for the spot won't matter how much the spot costs, they'll just pay the fee.

Having the ticket price linked to their income would immediately make the game fair. If you earn 10k/h and you need to pay a 100k ticket you will be more careful.

A millionaire in Finland got a 120k€ ticket for speeding a bit over the limit (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...). IIRC the CFO of Nokia had a similar experience.

    > super wealthy people

They probably don't drive themselves. I guess they have a driver, so ticketing isn't an issue.

It exists: https://www.sfmta.com/media/9654/download?inline

This appears to be a list of overpayments they haven't been able to refund, not a ranking of total fines to any given plate.

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