The city wouldn't have perverse incentives around parking tickets if all the money from them went straight into national healthcare budget, or foreign aid.

https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a...

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/us/20cncmeters.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/10/why-doe...

(Like Matt, I also found that if you look at the raw data, you'll find citations that are facially invalid; in my case, I found "overnight parking" citations issued in the middle of the day --- 50+ of them).

Last thought: I don't know about the state you live in, but in Illinois it is shockingly easy to FOIA a public body, and the law is to an extraordinary extent on your side. I just flattened Oak Park in a FOIA dispute with just a couple of emails. If you live in a state with Illinois-or-better FOIA (short statutory time window for public bodies to respond, fee recovery for successful legal challenges), you're almost certainly not FOIA'ing enough.

Also, if you're in Illinois: please FOIA your local police general orders, and let me know when you get them; I'm collecting them.

I am usually unwilling to accept that something is foul play until I have exhausted all other explanations, and your comment triggered my "but what if?" sense.

I can imagine, for instance, that a car is found with plenty of leaves underneath in a city where the street cleaning shows up in the morning. Or that a traffic cop sees the exact same three cars in the exact same position both at the end of their shift and in the middle of the day the next day.

Probability of the marks remaining and aligning midday next day if the car was gone overnight seems vanishingly small.

Low tech, maybe not definitive, but still hard to argue with.

Parking and traffic tickets are a way to increase revenue while still being able to say "We didn't raise taxes."

</curmudgeon>

It would be too inefficient and fraud-prone to actually work, but it's a nice idea.

That would be an efficient use of resources. This whole "law-making" thing isn't hard at all, what do they do all day in Congress?

Any time a government has a profit motive to enforce the law against its citizens you end up with corruption, it’s the same basic reason that civil asset forfeiture is such a big problem.

The other side of that argument is that the payment of the fine to the government is supposed to play a restorative role in whatever crime you have committed against the community. But I don’t think there’s a way to operate a system like that that does lead to this type of corruption.

Your idea fine in theory will be enacted by no substantial proportion of such institutions while banning such locally at the municipality, county, or state might in theory be at least possible to implement.

We can easily force these orgs to stop collecting fines we cannot stop government using fines to control behavior. Your ideas therefore are much more applicable to government than to this situation even if the same challenges apply.

Think of the revenue city governments could raise if they combined that with, "If you see something, say something". Portions of the fines could be paid to snitches in the interest of public safety.

I lived in the Chicago area, same as the author. In Chicago, parking signs read as if/else-if/else-if/else sequences that are annoying to parse while driving. The 'design process' (or whatever process manifested these signs) clearly had city processes but not users in mind.

In downtown Chicago, you can find yourself endlessly circling blocks in your car looking for a free spot, attempting to interpret contradicting parking signs, while some driver closely tails behind you impatiently. The street parking experience is very user-hostile.

The author points out a confusing spot between 1100N and 1166N State Street that has three signs on one pole. Such is a common occurrence.

https://goo.gl/maps/do93fXNdTnb1driQ7 Here, on the same pole there are two seemingly contradicting signs: one with a green circled P and another with a red crossed-out P, both with small arrows pointing in the same direction. There's a pay box and another pay to park sign. You the driver have 1–3 seconds to react and decide: do you risk it (it says tow zone... but it also says pay to park and there's a pay box right there!) or do you try the next street over (but this is already your 5th block and you're running late for your appointment)?

You could have sign wombo-combos that go like:

1. "Pay to park, 7 days a week" — okay, seems like you can park

2. "No stopping, no standing [A]am-[B]am, [C]pm-[D]pm, Mon-Fri" — oh, what time is it exactly? And today is a Monday, right?

3. "Street Cleaning, 1st Monday of the Month, [X]am-[Y]am, 1 Oct-1 Apr" — and which Monday of the month is today?

and so on. Exceptions upon exceptions upon exceptions.

This is why I am dead set against every congestion pricing program I've seen. It's not that the concept is wrong, but that its implementation is always another, unvoted-for tax.

Some DMVs are selling customer data to private companies. People who are supposed to wear ankle bracelets are charged rent by private companies with govt contracts to do so. Those are just two examples that I could think of, without even googling. They are gonna do whatever they can, for revenue.

A good percentage of the population believes government should be run like a business, without understanding the implications. Also people don't like taxes, even justified ones. All this leads parking tickets style situations.

I sometimes think about what government will do when autonomous cars take away a key revenue source and decided that it will invent new problems to fine. Taxation is avoided at all costs.