I spent a decade in the parking technology space. (Co-founder PayByPhone -- don't hate me, I genuinely tried to make things more civilized and convenient, I swear!). Anyways, I miss hearing about hilarious and genius hacks and escalations like this. The brilliance deployed to work around parking regulations is amazing.
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 is not paying for the parking I use. That is an easy problem to solve, as long as the price is "reasonable".
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.
The other day I went to a concert and parked my car at a parking lot. When the concert ended, of course there were masses of people trying to exit the parking lot. There were only 2 cashiers to pay the parking ticket — no automated machines. So we waited over an hour to pay our ticket. Time that we ended up paying with our ticket (per hour parking). The cashier didn’t want to refund us for the waiting time. If the law doesn’t require any standards requiring waiting times — why would a parking operator ever be incentivized to have an efficient checkout system? Especially if they are the only parking in town. Anyways lots of sketchy consumer violations in this space.
Had an attendant try to pull a similar stunt once. I simply told them that I was willing to sit at the booth until it was resolved to my satisfaction, or the cops showed up, while cars piled up behind me. A few moments of hemming and hawing, and out I went no charge. I was willing to pay what was owed, but I imagine “the system” couldn’t handle that, so write it off.
Awesome. If more people stuck to their guns like this, the whole system would fall apart, and this racket wouldn't work. It does work though, because most people are pushovers and seek to avoid confrontation. If more people would stand their ground against obvious fraud, the world would be a better place!
While I agree that's a hassle, I don't think this should result in a refund. It's like ordering dinner, eating it, and then wanting a refund for the meal because you waited a long time for the meal.
No it's like renting a car for a daily rate to be returned any day by midnight, coming back to return the car at 11:45pm and having to wait till after midnight to pay and being expected to pay for another day. ( yes not perfect analogy, but same idea. You were ready to return it, and they were not )
Incidentally, if you go to a restaurant, and you waited a long time for your meal (that is longer than their required service time) most restaurants will comp your bill, or at least give you free bottle/desert for the inconvenience. For reference, I've worked in half a dozen restaurants over as many years, and they all did this.
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.
It's more like eating dinner, finishing, and then no one being willing to take your money for an hour after you're ready to leave. A scenario that I've been in, and considered walking out, but the restaurant was too close to my house and I wanted to avoid any unpleasantness in the neighborhood.
i like it when i am asked to pay up front. on one side it feels pushy, like "you don't trust me, or what?", on the other it feels like a relief. it means i can relax, take my time as i want, as i don't need to account for additional check out time. also no more attempts to upsell me on more drinks, etc...
Until the food arrives, you don’t know how long it will take. When it arrives then you just... what, leave hungry?
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.
Hear hear! My favorite idiotic parking ticket story: back in grad school (at Stanford, so valley people watch out!), I got a $75 parking ticket once at 3am, in a lot for which my car had a valid permit (in student housing)... because I hadn't changed the DMV registration sticker. Mind you, my registration was renewed, I just hadn't put the new sticker on the plate.
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.
As a story with a different outcome, my mom parked in a BART parking lot at around 2:30pm one day. This particular lot became free at 3pm, so she had to pay for that half hour, but couldn't figure out where to pay. She went to the station agent to ask. The agent replied, "Eh, it's really hot out today. There's no way I'm going out there to check people's parking. Don't worry about paying." She did not get a ticket.
Parking technology must be full of fascinating stories. It's pretty much everyman against the faceless administration.
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.
It depends on how ruthless the city is about parking enforcement. AFAIK Some places have laws against parking at broken meters. Then again some places say it's legal.
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.
Back in the days of coin meters, civic-minded individuals would inject some two part epoxy in the slot, giving unlimited free parking to everyone. Problem solved (until they made parking at broken meters illegal).
I want you to know that I extended my parking space from my treadmill at Barry's today. Your company is great, bro. The Android app is less great, it just keeps crashing, but the functionality from the company itself is great (since I can just use the website).
It definitely is more civilized and convenient. Great service. Totally happy. You should be proud.
I find PayByPhone pretty convenient, especially now that it's got a few years of polish on the app. The key thing is that the signs are legible, and have the number you care about (parking zone?) right there in bold print. And hey, - at least that money isn't going to Impark.
They recently implemented PayByPhone at my apartment complex to the extreme chagrin of many residents including myself.
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.
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.
I understand where you're coming from! It's tough to be connected with a company associated with bad will or unfair cash grabs. I hope PayByPhone isn't in that territory, even if there are historic bad players in its industry. Measuring the thank-you's versus screw-you's I get, I'm happy to be associated with the company.
Hi, I'm a fan of PayByPhone! If you're partying with friends, you can exchange PayByPhone QR codes and pay each others' meters when the time is up without moving your cars.
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. :-)
It would suffice here to run a strap of webbing across your windshield, through the doors and tie the ends together on the inside. You don't need it to be tight, won't damage the paint.
My SUS company, EasyALPR focuses on commercial parking enforcement / vehicle control.
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.
The alternative to this solution is literally a clipboard and excel that doesn't really work. Allowing parking patrollers to capture photos and coordinates allows secretaries to avoid sometimes violent confrontations and I'm happy about that.
As for oppressing poor people, the great majority of people who I've seen get towed thanks to record keeping by EasyALPR are parking at commercial business parks. These are out in the suburbs and serve everything from medical offices to joe schmoe SEO company.
The most common violation is people parking in two hour parking for 3+ hours or all day. The parking is free, but it is restricted to two hours. (This is actually a very difficult thing to enforce regularly manually)
At the site I'm thinking of, there is actually longer term parking also free nearby for this facility, but people don't want to walk so they keep seeing if they can get away with abusing the closer short term parking. It is even allowed to move your vehicle to get two more hours for free, they just don't care.
- On the parking side, rich people can pay for parking. Some rich people don't and will get fines, which they can pay. Some poor people will risk getting a ticket so they can not spend that $4. (Someone will respond "just leave earlier and park further away" so let me premptively remind them thar poor people are often, e.g. single parents, working multiple jobs, etc, and don't have the luxury of leaving an hour earlier.) Then that person will get a $200 parking fine and it will be enough to plunge them from scraping by to even riskier practices (not having insurance, bad tires, pay day loans, etc) or even dropping out of university / school.
- Systematic ALPR is extremly effective. Literally everyone infringing will get a ticket if there are enough cars do scanning. Enforcement is often subcontracted out, with an objective criteria of maximising fines.
- Instead of the university administration focusing on priority areas, such as where parking would block exits, it becomes a profit source and they lose sight of what parking is for -- access by staff and students.
- ALPR is often part of an NSA style 'COLLECT ALL' policy. It will record the timestamped location of every vehicle. It is often onsold to data brokers, where it ends up in the hands of car repo services, people stalking their ex-partners, and, indirectly, the government.
- Obviously these things may not concern you, and there are indeed many other engineers who will enable this kind of surveillance. However, I believe there is a market for privacy respecting tech.
- Instead of providing direct ALPR time/location, consider providing just hits where it exceeds the max time period, and deleting scanning logs automatically. Make this part of the value proposition. (Obviously not possible with an SDK product, but consider who the buyers are and the licence terms you provide it under.)
- I dislike illegal parkers, bad drivers and so on as much as the next person, but I won't endorse the beginnings of a Chinese 'social credit' type system.
> Instead of the university administration focusing on priority areas, such as where parking would block exits, it becomes a profit source and they lose sight of what parking is for -- access by staff and students.
This is a strong point, and has lots of modern parallels (e.g. "civil forfeiture", gatsos), especially to do with cars. The only thing I'd say is that it's a bit of a stretch to ask the tech to prevent the university from going down this path, whether you blame it on greed or perverse incentives or whatever. I think ideally the parking enforcement system would be fair, simple, and without auxiliary functions like data collection for other purposes. What the administration (mis-)uses it for at that point is on them.
This parallels the encryption debate somewhat. Govt says 'we need a backdoor to your messaging system/phone to catch $criminal, trust our $system not to abuse it'.
Systems like Signal do not try to solve the problem of govt abuse. Instead, it constrains govts by making them find other ways to conduct surveillance, expanding the task of mass surveillance to one of creating implants for O(n) phones.
It's true that you can't prevent any University from seeking out dark tech patterns, but at least have them make that choice. The community can then have them accept responsibility for that.
Obviously legislation is needed to constrain rempant privacy violation, and we seem a long way off that, especially in the States and the UK. In the mean time, engineers should examine the ethical basis of their work, and consider how it effects their standing in society.
If you can't afford the $4 for parking, you can't afford a car. The rules don't become optional because you can't afford them. Being poor sucks but it doesn't give anyone the right to ignore the law.
And we've designed much of the world in such a way that if you can't afford a car, you can't participate in society in any meaningful way, so maybe come up with better solutions than "Don't drive lol."
This is higher level than this question, but I actually think the entire individual ownership of vehicles and having them the only viable method for getting to work for many as fundamentally broken.
So while I operate this tool that enforces a thing, I don't own a car myself and I honestly can't wait for some autonomous fleet-based future where parking lots are torn up and streets are wider and safer for bicycles and alternative transportation vehicles.
Well, instead you might incentiveise it through having car pool car parks that are closer to campus, or at least next to a well lit and preferably sheltered area. Then you could publicise the car pool scheme. You could even have a forum for finding other car poopers, and/or an app. Maybe allow people, with their consent, to be matched by approx origin/destination for easier finding.
If you had a computer science or math department then I'm sure they would have people who could solve the ride matching problem.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's Uber. Which then raises the question of why there isn't public transit.
Given that there often is a bus or even many buses, the question then might turn to "Why do people prefer their cars to a bus?". And now we're back at the beginning.
It's only Uber in the apocryphal sense of opportunistic ride sharing. The reality it that most Ubers are taxis. I'm talking about people already at the departure point, where their marginal cost is like 20% more minutes/fuel, and they can save %50 of their parking and fuel. Also being able to use the HOV Lane is pretty sweet.
The disconnectedness of suburbia is at the heart of this, but essentially insoluble in the short term.
But GP is correct. They only missed the part where the profits from increased parking fees should be used to either lower tuition, or spent on one of your schemes or public transport infrastructure.
OK, the actual design of the thing where it just uses suction is incredibly idiotic, but the kid who got free wireless internet for months by taking its sim card - that's pretty brilliant.
The alternative, tire boots, are equally asinine and more likely to damage the car. These seem fractionally better up to the point where they are hacked. Unessarily connected devices are a liability beyond measure, and it floors me that nobody seems to notice.
A boot, at least, does not obstruct a now-angry driver's view. I have no doubt people will try to drive away with these devices on their windshield despite the loud noise. It's a recipe for accidents.
I appreciate the many definitions of "hacking" and "turn on your defroster for 15 minutes" qualifies as a clever exploit.
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.
This is a stupid question, but something I’ve always wondered about is how tow trucks disengage the clutch and/or the parking brake... am I to understand that they simply don’t? So if I park my manual transmission car in reverse and with the parking brake on, they’re just going to literally drag my car to their lot or destroy my gearbox? How is this not a bigger issue?
They will just pick it up from whichever end is the drive side wheel, or they will 'break' into your car and put it in neutral. Depends on the tow business though, around me they only have flat bed haulers so they will just cable your car up and drag it on. Ideally also in neutral, but they would have no problem doing it even with a locked 4 wheel drive vehicle since the cable is lifting a bit up and the tow truck is many times heavier than any consumer vehicle and it isn't enough force at low speed to cause any damage.
Depends on the car and where it's drive wheels are. Also I think tow drivers are authorized to use a tool to break in to the car (non destructively) to put it in neutral if necessary.
Aside: if you ever notice a teeny tiny panel that has a dimple or hole to open it with by the shifter, that's the release for the interlock that prevents changing gears without the keys. That's how you get in neutral when the owner isn't present.
That’s different: in this case the student was knowingly using a metered service and would have no reason for doing so other than shifting their cost to someone else.
"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?
When I first saw these touted a few years ago I'd imagined they would be fairly trivial to bypass.
- 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.
I think penetrating oil would be counterintuitive, as it would just provide a better airtight seal, your best bet in that case is that we would slide more easily and maybe up and over the window edge gasket to break the seal
There's an entire industry of selling snake-oil Batman shit like this to law enforcement/mall cops. It's a delightful fusion of ill will, they operate with minimal oversight and get to take advantage of government (procurement), law enforcement (mostly ignorant of tech), and the good 'ol citizenry (cast as cattle as usual).
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.
Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong? An alternative headline could be something like, "Entitled College Kids Learn How To Keep Parking Like Assholes Without Paying Fines."
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.
The issue I have is cases like at my school where they basically had entrapment. At the start of every year there'd be like 2-3 months where it's a free for all and students could park wherever. The certainty was nowhere near adequate parking and not everywhere that people parked was readily obvious to be illegal. Some spots had the yellow on the curb worn away 90%, others were things like too close to a corner or hydrant by everyone was doing it those 2-3 months that you get used to it and think it's okay and when there's no other spots left you park in one of those spaces (kind of like when people start creating a new parking lane in the center of a full parking lot).
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.
Not entrapment, just a case of administration trying to save costs by not dealing with the issue until it becomes too much and then cutting costs once it’s in control again.
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.
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.
Which is exactly why you're able to speed with impunity, even if you receive a ticket for it?
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.
Highly unethical to expect people to follow the law? We're not talking acts of civil disobedience against unjust laws, we're talking willful abuse of laws designed for public safety.
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?
It is transparently using the enforcement in a predatory way. Their goal clearly isn't to keep the parking enforced or they would have done it from the start or at least after move in times. That is what is highly unethical - they deliberately let the /problem start/ for profit.
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.
I don't know the situation, but I could easily imagine parking violations being common where parking is inadequate. Instead of improving the situation, the school simply rakes in money.
This really depends on the state. In Montana, for example, it is a legal requirement that parking is funded separate from the rest of the school. This means that no tuition can pay for new lots or enforcement. Fees gathered from normal parking rates and fines are used only to maintain and/or improve the parking.
This seems like a really convenient way for schools to pass the buck on to their students, while administrative bureaucrats continue to rake salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
How is is not? Many colleges now have more administration staff than education faculty... I know that at my university they constructed a massive new building to house their growing administrative staff.
Not quite 50/50 but the University of Oregon lists 2075 faculty and 1521 administrators and officers of administration. Also, 112 of those faculty are listed as retired.
Why should students get free parking? It is a choice to use the parking facilities (those with mobility issues aside). I am in favor of parking rates being based on commute distance. If you live within a reasonable walking distance, say two miles, then you can't get a parking pass. Then concentric rings out from there with decreasing cost. While there would be some address fraud, it would help to reduce the dependence on parking.
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.
Why are college kids driving in the first place? Are there not enough apartments nearby to rent a room in walking/cycling/shuttle range? Isn't that a pretty foreseeable need when choosing a site for a university?
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 are both "residential" and "commuter" colleges. For instance in my locale, the Big Ten university is mostly residential for undergrads (served by large student rental neighborhoods), and the housing typically chosen by grad students has decent access to the bus service, or bike-friendly routes.
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.
This really depends on the college town. In East-Coast urban cores, most students won't be able to afford to park at any time. Everywhere else in USA, they have free parking where they stay, and also they're culturally conditioned to consider walking or biking to be beneath their station, so they'll consider free parking near their classes to be their birthright.
Which university? I've never been on a major college campus where it was even possible to park near the classroom buildings, much less practical. I live a few blocks from a Big Ten university in the Midwest. When classes are in session, the extensive rows of bike racks are stuffed full of bikes, to the point where illegal bike parking is actually a problem.
What I described is certainly the situation at e.g. Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska, to name three "Big Ten" schools. I suppose I haven't done a complete survey, however. There are lots of other, smaller colleges where this is also true.
In my home town the local community college was a 45 minute drive from my parents house. I couldn't afford to move in to the city just to go to school. People who move to attend college are the exception not the rule, by the numbers.
Yeah, but further down in the article it mentioned that students illegally parked junkyard cards to get booted so that all the boots would be in use when the cops found someone's actual vehicle they wouldn't have any boots left.
> 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.
You hit the nail on the head. It's not about enforcement it's ease of collecting money.
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.
Entitled College Kids Learn How To Keep Parking Like Assholes Without Paying Fines."
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 hate people who don't park in a proper spot or who just leave the car in a garage in a spot next to the door all summer while they leave town/country like used to happen at my old university but I see this more as "college spends money on some high tech device that is easily circumvented and has poor security" than as college students screwing over the system.
meh - one can argue with the advent of the internet the entire college system is a farce. College at this point is just for building your network and securing that “dream job” because employers like to check off those boxes instead of actually finding qualified applicants.
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.
People still need motivation to learn. Just because the knowledge is available doesn't mean they'll ingest it on their own. College may provide a structured environment helping with that. Or in this case a different kind of motivation to learn.
I do think paying for something is a great motivator. When you pay for college, the risk of failing is you wasting your money. When you pay for therapy, the risk of not doing as the therapist suggests is you wasting your money as well.
Of course, I dont think college needs to be on the "life-crippling debt" scale of payment for this to work.
Although online tutors/teachers are pretty effective since you usually don't make physical contact with your teachers but they still provide the motivation and structure. Oh, I suppose that's what an online degree is. You'd just have to work on making exams cheat resistant.
Well you pointed out one reason a in person school is better than the internet. I think having a face to face teacher is a big help, plus students you can easily interact with helps as well. And shoot isn't that the whole point of college, to have a discourse?
I think to many people attend college, and it is to expensive. But I don't think the internet has obviated the classroom.
At another university, if you were a TA, you would have a “faculty” account flag, which would give you another option to pay any parking fines—deduction from your paycheck. Except TAs don’t have paycheck. The system would deduct from 0, and would not go negative but still count the fine as paid.
I don't believe campus police actually has any legal power. It also isn't the police department's SIM card, Barnacle owns it - of course it's still considered theft.
This is common for public universities, for the obvious reason: they're already a branch of the state, so it makes sense for security to officially be state police.
Depends on the campus. At the University of Pittsburgh, campus police are an accredited law enforcement agency with jurisdiction within so many hundreds of feet of University property. Ditto for our transit police.
It seems difficult to crack down on removing the things. It sounds like they're easy enough to detach that even people who aren't the owner might steal them, or at least break into them for the unlimited SIM card.
Thanks so much to the university for coming up with the barnacle or I would have missed these really brilliant hacks that seemed to keep improving one after the other. Parking 12 scrappy car was so low-tech and yet so effective but juicing the sim card for months has to be appreciated for going the extra mile.
> Obviously, some students thought that fee was ridiculous – just like paying for parking at a university where you’re already paying a hefty tuition fee
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.
My community college had more parking spaces than students on campus at any given time. They then did construction, resulting in one of the largest lots and some of the smaller lots being closed. There was still would have been enough parking for everyone, except they then rented out another parking lot to a pair of local companies. So, we ended up paying for parking when no parking was actually available. This was, of course, after raising the parking fees. The schools initial
response to the problem was to get on campus earlier; which is an absolutely absurd statement for a community college since the demographics include a lot of single mothers and otherwise working adults. Not to mention everyone had to travel to campus because there was no housing. (To top it off, the nearby residents petitioned the city to make their streets permit only. I hope they and their visitors get ticketed regularly.)
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.
> The schools initial response to the problem was to get on campus earlier; which is an absolutely absurd statement for a community college since the demographics include a lot of single mothers and otherwise working adults.
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.
I operated a car pool for several students when I was taking evening classes. This is probably difficult for full time students, but with a little effort would probably work.
Mass transportation options coupled with high density buildings should be the way to go. Parking just doesn’t scale.
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.
It's great if you have them, but the more common situation seems to be to jack up parking prices while transit is still abysmal.
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.
Yah, UC Davis runs its own bus service (entirely run by students, actually), and has run a decades long psy-ops campaign to get people to ride bikes. It seems to have worked quite well!
But we are talking about what it takes to get lazy Americans to bike. I am well aware of how popular biking is in Copenhagen even though they have comparatively terrible weather. Davis truly has an unusual confluence of factors that make biking more appealing to Americans.
On the other hand, lots of other cities in California and elsewhere have similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Copenhagen has very different circumstances but huge bike uptake.
It's fundamentally about policy. Take the steps, and you'll get the results.
We don't need to mold the whole world into the tightly packed metropolis model. Those areas are fine for people who like that kind of living but a lot of others including me don't.
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.
The thing however is that the tightly packed urban model allows the more rural lifestyles to exist. Designing towns and cities to be densely packed or at least space efficient allows people in those environments to get where they need to go with public transportation, bikes, and walking. This allows these people to get rid of their cars and makes space for people like you who prefer living away from the densely packed landscape to live your life with reduced inconveniences like traffic and lack of parking spaces.
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.
Increasing density is precisely what we must do, because the alternative, car-centric kind of living is this close to giving us an expiration date that’s perceptibly on the horizon.
Towns are fine, it's suburban sprawl that's the problem. If you like the outdoors and wilderness, you should want more people to live in the city so they don't tarnish the countryside. I would really like to see hunters start getting along with urbanists, they have more in common than they know.
That's easy to say when you are largely insulated by the effects due to wealth, which not coincendentally was derived from an economic system that created the crisis in the first place.
That cavalier attitude cannot be adopted by the estimated 300M refugees climate change is projected to create over the next few decades.
You don’t have to be manhattan-lite. You can totally be Tokyo-lite instead. Of course one of the main hurdles is America’s race and class problem which caused the segregation and dispersion in the first place.
That's great for urban campuses. But what about suburban and rural ones?
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.)
> They just have to pay "market rate" for the privilege of parking at their own damn jobs?
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.
Prefix: I know you were rebutting the idea of rate parking at universities. This reply is just to cover some other possible solutions that are not incompatible with the rate parking idea.
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.
A walk on a beautiful campus while going to work does not sound all that terrible. To your point, including free or reduced cost parking for staff and not students sounds reasonable.
- 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.)
Wouldn't it make sense that the university, that is charging the students all this money, ensure they have enough parking spaces to satisfy likely demand?
Doesn't seem unreasonable for universities with very high tuitions, to provide amenities like reliably available parking.
This is just spreading the cost of parking to people who don't use it... instead of only people who drive their own cars paying for the parking, now everyone has to.
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?
This new engineering building is just spreading the cost of classrooms to people who don’t use it.
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.
To be fair, many college buildings are provided in large part by donations, but I don't think the same is true for parking lots.
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?
Which is good. This is what you want in a developed space.
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.
There are schools that include passes for local transit in their tuition as well. CU Denver did it when I attended about a decade back, and San Francisco State started doing it recently as well.
Universities often disproportionately distribute costs, especially with facilities that are not used by everyone. This should be treated no differently despite the anti-car (or anti-sports, or anti-leisure, or anti-gaming, or anti-phone, etc) sentiment of late.
> Wouldn't it make sense that the university, that is charging the students all this money, ensure they have enough parking spaces to satisfy likely demand?
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.
For the same reason that lots of other things are subsidized, paid for even if you don't use them
- 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.
Better air quality, lower carbon-cost of transport benefit you even if you don't use it. Similarly for sporting facilities in a state with any sponsoring of medical needs (I'm in UK).
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?
The good thing about charging is that is discourages use of a finite resource, and encourages the use of cheaper and more environmentally friendly options like car pooling, public transit, etc... If you make something free people soak it up.
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.
It's a slippery slope when discussing subsidizing. Should students who are Lit majors subsidize expensive research labs? Or sports teams? College costs really can't be a la carte.
Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. Do we pay for all food students eat? The clothes they wear? The houses they live in? The cars they drive?
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"?
No, it isn't. The literature department is a fundamental component of the university. Providing land and infrastructure for students to store their property in the middle of campus is not - especially when campus is accessible through a variety of modes of transit. Sure, if the university is in a cornfield in Iowa then parking costs are less of an issue given the low cost of land but the majority of campuses I have been to are limited in land. The university has to make a choice between using that land to educate people or for letting people store their cars.
Honestly, I think students should pay different amounts based on the infrastructure they need for their degree. New students pay some flat amount, and once they declare a major, they pay whatever that major costs. A lit major won't require much infrastructure, so they should pay less than an engineering student that needs access to more expensive equipment, but they'll also likely get a lower salary after college. Students should likewise be presented with estimated salaries upon graduation, as well as estimated cost of their education (including books and whatnot).
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.
The school should pay for it out of their capital funds from their endowment. A lot of Midwestern schools have literally no public transportation so if you want to go anywhere you need a car. Stop looking at basic services as cash flow generators.
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.
A spot in a multistory parking desk costs upwards of $30,000 per spot. Even if you oversell permits by 2x and assume a 50-year lifespan with no maintenance, that is still $300/yr per parking permit. Why should students who want the exclusive right to leave their property on campus be subsidized by students who take more space/environmentally efficients modes of getting to campus?
>>A spot in a multistory parking desk costs upwards of $30,000 per spot
>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".
I get where you're coming from and I agree that people should pay what they owe, but just to split hairs...
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.
At my school, they did many of these things. In fact, it was generally accepted that you shouldn't drive to school, and they made many alternatives.
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.
Maybe instead of hiring more administrators or building a luxury dorm, the university could build a parking garage.
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.
"Number if students who need to park" is not a fixed number. Some of the students parking might have alternative ways to get to school, but will choose to drive if parking is free. Others might have no good alternatives and need to drive.
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.
Parking fees at my university are only in small part due to rationing. You can see this because they recently added fees for the weekend, when they is no need to ration parking spots. For some reason, some university parking authorities are setup not serve the students and staff, but to make money/be cost neutral. That makes no sense to me.
If if I was trying to solve this problem and actually cared about the students I would do some capacity based pricing.
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.
> 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.
I mean, the plan could be to destroy random cars if the parking lot is full, to make space for more. That might be slightly worse than this person's plan.
You can still know a range in advance and you can alert people on their phone before charging them - I'd much prefer this to having to pay all the time even when capacity is low.
The problem is that people need to know in advance to change their behavior: tell them that today will cost $20 and people will take the campus shuttle, bike, or walk. Tell them that you’re charging more after they got there just makes it stressful and won’t change behavior unless it happens often enough to be highly predictable - just like many people drive hoping traffic won’t be bad today because they’re prone to dismissing bad events as outliers.
I think this is a fair criticism and if the goal is to change behavior then I agree.
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?
If that's true then they're already doing it and they should have it free sometimes.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
Well part of making that progress is making the status quo (driving your car to school) slightly more inconvenient by charging to park. That will encourage other modes of transportation.
Not really. Let's imagine students live off campus and commute in each day. If they have lectures at the start of the day, then you'll get a space. But if you have one lecture at 3pm on a given day and don't elect to spend the entire day on campus then you're likely unable to get a parking space.
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.
Imagine a doctor working at two hospitals who has to move his car from one location to the other mid-day between surgeries. Is it more fair for him to have a worse parking spot and take longer to get to the operating room because he didn't park there earlier? Or should spots be given based on need?
Repeat that but with a cleaner who is struggling to get by with 2 jobs while studying and is providing for kids. It seems much more likely given the location in this story too.
If the parking fees are too low, it’ll just turn into first-come-first-serve.
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.
It is 'fair' in some senses and not others... it means if you are a student with later classes, you are less likely to get parking.
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"
I went to a large university located in the middle of nowhere. On any given day, only half of the avaliable spots were filled. A parking pass was $300 a semester IIRC.
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
Why is the University allowed to accept tuition from more students than it has parking spaces? How would a student unable to park be able to attend classes? I can see using parking fees to allocate more desirable parking spaces, but effectively preventing tuition paying students from being able to attend classes is not acceptable (my opinion).
> How would a student unable to park be able to attend classes?
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?
These are the sort of topics where the US-ness of HN really shines through. Though it’s true that if the alternatives to driving require infrastructure that does not exist in many places then they’re not really short-term solutions.
The vast majority of universities are accessible by more than just cars, such as buses/shuttles, biking, and walking. If all else fails, you can organise your own shuttle service through carpooling.
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.
> how should we handle distributing a limited number of parking spaces when there are more people who want to park than available spaces?
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?
> Members of the University in statu pupillari who are in residence in term or in the Long Vacation period of residence are required to have a University Motor Licence if they wish to keep motor vehicles (other than mopeds) within 10 miles of Great St Mary's Church.
Unless the university owns all land within 10 miles of Great St Mary's Church Cambridge University has it horribly wrong.
It could be like the school my wife graduated from. You had to pay for a parking pass, but the pass didn't guarantee a spot. You were basically paying for the privilege of showing up an hour early to try and get a parking spot. It was a couple hundred dollars a year as well.
Universities are incentivized to build buildings and destroy parking areas, because buildings make money and parking lots don't. Thus most universities are parking-constrained. The solution is to change that incentive structure, not to ration ever-dwindling parking spaces.
A university incentivized to educate students and do research will do the same because buildings are more suitable for these purposes than parking lots.
I think it's about the demographics. College students are cash-poor but time-rich, so they are more than willing to come in early and circle around to find a spot if it means they don't have to pay. College students are generally more liberal, so the capitalistic way of selling resource to the highest bidder naturally attracts resentment.
If the community collectively believe paying-with-time is the best way to allocate resources, charging parking fee is nothing more than money-grabbing.
My old uni sold the rights to operate their garages for the next 50 years to campus park to build a couple dorms. Prices basically doubled across all tiers when the garages were privatized
"Parking here [inconveniences|isn't fair to|creates danger for] others, so if you leave your car here, we will make the situation worse by ensuring the alleged harm will continue longer than it otherwise would."
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.
Quote: "The company’s CEO says improvements have been made to counter these hacks already, but we’re curious to see where this parking arms race heads next."
Me too, lol. Can't wait to see as well, I mean you put your low solution vs students who eat this stuff as hobby and you think you'll best them? good luck there Mr. CEO
I suspect in warm climates, the sun will save you the trouble of the defroster, especially if they fit it in the morning when it is cooler and you come back in the late afternoon when the car is at its hottest to reduce the vacuum pressure and the seal rubber at its most pliable due to the heat.
I doubt the defroster trick is as much about expanding what little air is left under the suction cup and more about making the rubber plyable enough to lift an edge enough to break the seal. So summer should be quite a bit easier.
The animosity towards OU parking is real. When I was there 15 years ago, the big deal was that fines were cheaper than a pass, so why bother? Parking costs are crazy for a suburban school, and parking enforcement is used as a money maker. Last I checked, they were building buildings in parking lots without replacing those spaces. <insert rant on the issues of higher ed financing>
This reminds me of when I was in Hawaii visiting my brother who lived in a high rise building. This was years ago so all I had ever know was the lock and key but his building had key cards and the doors would just unlock with the swipe of a card and you could go to your unit. He explained they are just magnetically locked. I asked well couldn't you just pry them open? We decided to try and sure enough with 2 of use we were able to pull past the strong electromagnet. It didn't really seem overly hard I am sure a strong person could do it alone.
That doesn't seem like they used an electromagnet that was strong enough (an implementation problem rather than a problem with the design). Well-provisioned magnetic door locks should be stronger than the door or a comparable physical lock.
"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."
Yes, this way the people who ignore parking fines can keep filling spaces, of which there are now 12 less.
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.
How does this “benefit” other students? They're the ones who are being inconvenienced by scofflaws and if it's like most other places quite likely endangered: the same people who park illegally tend to be cavalier about blocking bike lanes and curb cuts, speeding, rolling through crosswalks, etc.
As someone who commuted to college parking illegally is just something you have to do. I had parking fines I had to pay before receiving my diploma even though I made the grades and such. Parking and universities is a mess.
If you are low income, and need to get to school but have no other way to go than to drive, what else should you do?
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.
what does low income have to do with this? driving is expensive. between fuel, vehicle maintenance, parking, and insurance, driving your personal vehicle should not be the "low income" choice.
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.
Your comment completely ignores the reality for many, many people.
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.
>what does low income have to do with this? driving is expensive. between fuel, vehicle maintenance, parking, and insurance, driving your personal vehicle should not be the "low income" choice.
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.
You left out insurance, which is a big chunk of change, and all of the costs for when you don’t have a family mechanic who doesn’t charge by the hour and needs parts, not to mention the cost of towing, missed work, etc. when the cheap car breaks. Theft is still a concern unless you can afford safe parking, too - even a beater usually has parts worth something to a thief.
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).
>the same people who park illegally tend to be cavalier about blocking bike lanes and curb cuts, speeding, rolling through crosswalks, etc.
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.
We have public records here in DC. Most times I report someone doing something antisocial (e.g. blocking lanes, crosswalks, refusing to yield, etc. - things which actively inconvenience other road users) using hmdapp.io there’s at least a 50% chance that they have multiple unpaid tickets. The highest I’ve seen is over $10k, but others have found drivers over $40k.
That's absolutely the case, and traffic scofflaws ought to be hit where it hurts: yank their license. Traffic signs (including parking) are there to keep traffic flowing, they don't put them up because they look pretty.
I think the argument is that this isn't to the benefit of other students, only to the benefit of other students that park improperly. Improperly parked cars decreases parking supply and puts more stress on students who park properly since they are unlikely to double park or park in a non marked location, whereas bad actors would be willing to deal with the low supply by parking even more improperly.
We're not celebrating people who park selfishly, we're celebrating people who use a clever hack to defeat a harmful solution to the problem of people parking selfishly.
The point of DeCSS and qrpff, for instance, was not that piracy is a good thing but that DRM is a bad thing.
Driving an individual vehicle and parking it at a college is the first-order bad thing here. The parking spaces occupy useful land and the cars pollute the campus air.
Everything else is about people trying to avoid being asked to take responsibility for the impact of doing that.
OU is a campus built around the assumption that automobiles are the primary mode of transport. You cannot tell people "just don't drive" at a campus like this; you have to build a campus and its associated infrastructure such that people have reasonable alternatives. This is society's problem to fix, not drivers'.
Paying for a parking spot isn't actually taking responsibility for doing that - how does it solve any of the problems that illegal parking causes?
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.
None of that sounds like taking responsibility for the impact of occupying useful land and polluting the campus air, which is what you claimed to care about.
(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.)
Don't park selfishly and you don't suffer the consequences. It's that simple. The only issue here is that selfish parkers get their car back at all, they clearly aren't responsible enough to own one.
Why should the campus subsidize the car-owning students? If those students want exclusive use of a public space why not let them pay market rates for it?
Sure - this is always a balancing act but given how expensive cars are to own and the students who can’t use them, I would generally favor increasing transit and sidewalks, etc. rather than subsidizing parking since that benefits everyone.
The students are paying for a service from the University. It's very reasonable that the University provide parking space for those who can't afford to live on campus. Actually, it's in their best interest, unless they want to be an online school. And thus similarly in the best interest of all students, if they want a locally accessible University to exist.
The students are paying for an education. If they prefer to drive, their fellow students who make other choices should not be expected to subsidize them.
Are you kidding? If parking was free then nobody would be able to park there. Everyone would drive even if they only lived a few blocks away or a single bus ride away.
It would be unavailable to students who actually need it.
I saved money by living off-campus and driving to school using the cheap car that I also needed to get to work. There are a lot of places in the US like that, where you can't afford not to have a car.
> If that would seriously be the issue with free parking, then build parking garages.
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.
It's Oklahoma. The city is likely very spread out and even if there are public transport options, you will need a vehicle to get to and from the bus stop.
It's not UC Davis or Europe. Btw, if living near the main centroid of Davis, it's faster to bike than it is to drive or take a bus because parking + walking takes time. I even had the gate code to park right next to classrooms (it's good to know the parking folks, especially on rainy days) but that still took more time and costed more money than biking. Davis is also one of the most walkable cities, especially living around downtown.
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.
Because schools pretend to charge cash in order to separate casual drivers from those that absolutely need it. However, given the costs of car ownership and tuition, the cost of parking permits are generally (a) not a deterrant to “casual drivers” (people willing to bear the cost without urgent need), (b) disproportionately impactful on those that Do need to drive, (c) basically just milking students.
It is downright amazing how much information asymmetry is seen as a prerequisite to maintain law and order.
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.
The cards are heavily stacked against anything that uses suction to clamp on. Basically any leak of atmospheric pressure into the suction voids, and it's game over.
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.
What the article doesn't state is what advantage the Barnacle offers over a more traditional boot design. OK, there's the online payment thing, but that could be equally implemented with a boot. So why the convoluted design? Is it because you can drive around a bit (dangerously) while the barnacle is on?
A couple of things, it’s quicker and requires less knowledge to apply, less damage to vehicles, and you don’t need a parking officer to come out to remove it; they just dial it in and it pops off, and the barnacled person drops it in a drop box. This removes the need for 24/7 parking officer shifts to need to come out and remove the device.
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."
Let it be known that putting that kind of stuff on the student's car is NOT OK. A locked car cover may be helpful (would it help with the stuff in the wheel too? even if not, put your own locked cover on the wheel) (it would also prevent people from putting papers in the wind shield, I think).
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.
Normally I would think “break the rules, pay the fines” but I am sympathetic in this case. When I was in college I had to put my bicycle in the back of my truck and park about two miles away from campus because there was literally never valid parking on campus and the school was doing next to nothing to fix the problem.
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
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!