The 'unofficial' policy of parking enforcement here is to ticket everything you see, regardless of whether or not the car is actually in violation of something.

They know it's far cheaper for drivers to just pay the fines than it is to fight the tickets. Arguing a parking ticket can literally take several entire days. Forget just contesting them in writing, the written appeals are automatically denied every single time. I don't even think anyone reads them, there's probably just some flunky at a desk who opens them and immediately sends them back with a pre-printed denial letter.

It's what I'm doing in Chicago, and it's actually not as much money as you'd think it is. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lot and is about as predatory as it gets, but it's not in the billions, compared to many other things.

Of the parsable ones I have, the total since 2009 up until March of this year, there's been a total of $764,775,070 marked as "paid". Tickets marked with a bankruptcy flag has added up to 18,433,390.0.

Wanted to finish up some code to get better output, but I have to run.

Of course I just paid it.

i've heard about a couple of apps for this sort of thing, e.g. http://www.parksafela.com