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from the Your-honor,-there-was-a-tree-branch-blocking-the-sign! dept.
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, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 16 2018, @02:43AM (3 children)
My brother had his car stolen when he lived in D.C. The most efficient part of the D.C. government is the parking enforcement. They found his car, and only troubled to notify him of it after it had racked up a month's worth of parking tickets and been towed and impounded. He had to go to court to remind them he had reported it stolen. Got all the tickets dismissed.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 16 2018, @11:31AM (2 children)
Bet he didn't win the towing or impound feed back...
We had a car stolen in Miami early Saturday morning (rain again, covered the noise of smashing the window, again.) Reported it stolen at 9am, looked for it ourselves until 2pm - at 2pm we were actually looking in the exact spot it had been recovered from at 1pm. Called the authorities 4x every 2 hours from noon until 6pm - no word of recovery. Finally left town after the 4pm call to go on the trip we were supposed to leave on at 9am. Came back Sunday night at 6pm, called, still no word of recovery. Called at 9am Monday - reply: "Oh, yes, your car was recovered at 1pm on Saturday, it's at such and such impound lot with towing and 48 hours storage fees accrued already, fees are probably higher than the residual value of the car after the joyriders got done with it, you'll need to go sign it over to the impound lot and pay them for whatever you owe them above the salvage value of the car."
F-ing assholes, we paid them off, got a $10 towing strap and pulled it back to the house ourselves, then sold it to a junk dealer for about $50 more than we had paid in fees. All in all would have been easier to sign it over to the towing yard, but I'll be damned if I'll be any more compliant with that racket than is absolutely required by law. Oh, another gem: visited the car Monday morning around 10am, it started and ran, shut it down. Got back at 4pm with the truck and towing strap, car wouldn't start anymore and had signs of additional looting since 10am.
Towing yards are legalized theft rings, all they need is any legal excuse to engage and then they ream whoever they come into contact with. Asshole at our place of business put up "parking permit required" signs and handed out permits to us, the tenants of the last 10 years who always paid our rent on time. The guy who actually handed over the last 100+ on-time rent checks to the landlord forgot his permit in his other car one morning, landlord called the towing company at 3pm, and at 4pm when trying to go home our guy had to pay $200 to get his car back from the towing yard 1 block down the street from the lot where they towed him from 30 minutes earlier.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 16 2018, @09:44PM (1 child)
Wow, yeah, that's a worse racket than any I've experienced. I'll have to ask my brother if he got the impound fees back.
Cities run roughshod over us when we take that sort of crap lying down. Sometimes the only way to get their attention is make a big stink-- document (record on video) their conduct and report the minions to their superiors in the city government who just might possibly not know about it. If they do know, can subtly threaten them by mentioning that a copy of the recording can be given to the media, or posted online where it just might go viral. Ask for hearings, show up and embarrass the politicians at the next council meeting, vote against them, boycott the city and let the Chamber of Commerce know the city's shenanigans are costing them business, report them to state and federal agencies who really do work to bust corrupt cities and shut down their rackets, and even sue the bastards. Of course they've carefully set their grift small enough that it costs more to fight than to just pay up. They count on that.
The Los Angeles airport tried to stick us with a parking ticket. Got us at a parking meter that I had timed down to the minute. We were picking up my brother, but he had changed flights. So I hurried out to put more money in. I found the meter had expired, and there was already a ticket on it. It should have been close to expiring, but not quite expired. I had suspicions of parking enforcement having hurried the meter along, or maybe the meter ran fast, and they weren't too scrupulous about making sure meters kept time accurately. As we didn't live in California, we felt there wasn't much they could do about it if we skipped town without paying the ticket. That's usually the simplest way to deal with a parking meter racket. Naturally I did not put any more money in the meter, not after they had the rudeness to ticket us. So they lost money on that deal, and serve them right.
No matter what crap they try, I always strive to punish them right back. Make them lose business, embarrass them, cost them the money it takes to hold a hearing, whatever. I know the hearings are kangaroo courts-- but I'm not really trying to win, I know the deck is stacked against me. I'm just costing them money so they don't profit from me, collect less in punitive fines than it cost them to run the hearing.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 16 2018, @10:11PM
The "permit required" towing story comes from Miami Beach - a little city of 20,000 residents next to the urban metro 1M+ population, only 1 of our 15 employees actually lived in Miami Beach and could influence politicians with their vote. This is the same Miami Beach that blocked rail transit from the bigger city because they prefer not to have "rabble" getting easy-cheap access to their clubs and restaurants, if you can't afford a car and valet parking, then they don't want you there anyway. All of Dade county is a mish-mash of these smaller cities, even the big ones only had ~300,000 population back then - it makes the politicians... harder to get a lever on. The city of South Miami ran a parking meter scam on its downtown area, I threatened as you suggest and actually did cease and desist all business with their downtown shops, but they just don't even start to care.
There may well be a bench warrant out on you in California now, not sure at what point they meshed the databases well enough to track back, but I know that South Florida has toll roads which will ID plates on rental cars (and owned cars from the 50 states) and send you your toll road bill in the mail a couple of months after you use the road. My University ticketed me for parking in the commuter lot a few weeks before I graduated - classes weren't in session and the commuter lots were supposed to be free to park in, but apparently they bent the rules to allow themselves to start ticketing a week early. I protested the ticket, was denied, ignored the bills - $20 fine, no interest, they must have sent me 20 collection attempt letters over the next 7 years, even if I had paid (which I never did) they still would have lost money. Since graduation nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, has ever asked for a direct mailed transcript - I have one showing my BS and 2 years of my Master's degree, that has been good enough for the last 35 years. Similarly, I got into a billing dispute with AT&T over a $30 bill they sent me that should have been $10 - couple of funny stories about that over the years, but in the end not paying that bill probably helped me more than it hurt, especially 6.5 years later when a credit report came back with the years-past-due on that one single $30 bill and tens of thousands of mortgage and CC paid on-time every time, somehow that looks even better than a "spotless" credit record, at least to real people.
I've taken (more than) a couple of speeding tickets to court, and you're right, the court proceedings cost them more than the fine, especially when the officer shows to defend, and if the officer doesn't show you automatically win, so it's basically a lose for them either way if you fight it - however, my last few tickets (some bogus, some not, spread maybe 4 tickets over the last 20 years), I've just paid them, considering them "road tax" payment for me to drive as I please rather than worrying about whether I might get a ticket or not. It's definitely cheaper and easier to not fight them in court, win or lose.
🌻🌻 [google.com]