Utilizing FOIA and some clever software Mr. Chapman quickly identifies a troubled spot for parking in Chicago and gets results!
http://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-source-of-parking-tickets.html
The story relates how the author used Freedom of Information Act requests to gather raw data on parking tickets issued in Chicago. What he received was a semicolon-delimited text file containing a great number of data entry errors. The author outlines the steps taken to clean and extract data on a likely problematic parking location. Armed with this data, he visited the location and discovered very confusing signage. He reported this to the city, who rectified the signage. This led to a 50 percent decrease in the number of tickets issued for that location.
I immediately asked myself three things
1. How much more effective has that corner become?
2. Who's grumbling about the loss of revenue?
3. What would happen if more of us did this very thing?
(Score: 3, Informative) by pipedwho on Wednesday August 15 2018, @11:49PM
It’s ‘ticket’ parking. Meaning you can pay for up to fours during that period. So you can pay for less or pay for the whole block. There’s no sign for ‘unlimited’ metered parking, which would defeat the supposed purpose for timed and metered parking, which is to better share the available space.
The real problem is the constant increasing city population density with virtually no increase in parking spaces.