This is common in several countries in Europe. Typically a white dial / black digits rotating inside a square blue disk [0].
In Belgium the streets where that metering system is used (but the city also uses other metering systems: it's on a street by street basis) have a little picture of that disk printed on the street at regular intervals. It's very common to have some streets where parking is totally free, others that use this plastic clock disk and yet others that use a more common metering system.
It's a thing to set your timer on your phone to 1h55 minutes, knowing you have 5 minutes left to go advance the disk by two hours (yup, cheating).
Another common one is that typically at night parking is allowed, so you park on monday evening and directly set the clock to 8am. So you're good until 10am.
They are of course illegal.
For that matter, even if it only moves in steps you could still be unlucky in several ways. For example if the parking inspector is looking at it at the same time as it makes a big leap forward in time.
If the area is subject to multiple inspections every day then the parking inspector might also notice that the same car is sitting in the same spot between multiple inspection rounds over many hours. No amount of technologically advanced timers will help the cheater then.
Perhaps someone could also invent car paint that changes colour every hour :p and then hope the parking inspector and everyone else are not looking the moment the colour changes.
That, also exists:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23540358/bmw-color-changin...
The objective of the meter is to raise revenue though
I don’t believe parking revenue is that large, but I don’t really track it (feel free to surprise me). Just collecting and managing the fees is expensive, as the article specifies.
tl;dr if you can't read it due to GDPR:
>Parking meter revenues are nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. With 61 years to go on the 75-year lease, Chicago Parking Meters LLC has now recouped its entire $1.16 billion investment, plus $502.5 million more.
Gross revenue is roughly $12/resident/year, and that's not factoring in administrative costs, staffing, etc.
That's pretty small change.
If admin costs and staffing come anywhere even close to that, the contractor is screwing up.
>Since 2009, CPM has invested $38 million to modernize the City’s on‐street parking, replacing 36,000 outdated single‐space, coin‐operated ‘meters’ with 4,700 state‐of‐the‐art pay stations that accept both credit and debit cards. In addition, CPM has established a refund option, a 24‐hour customer service center and a state‐of‐the‐art maintenance and repair process.
https://parkchicago.com/about/
So one year's profit investment into infra.
Not exactly a very high-tech system ; )
It is just fiddly to input the fare zone on those cheap rubbery buttons and you do need to take it to a store occasionally to fill it up with credit. If you want to overstay you would need two of these devices, I don't know if they had any security to prevent that. I can't find any pictures so I guess smartphones and a central database have made them obsolete.
Then anyone walking by can see the time that you parked the car
I think every car in Europe has this parking clock/disk.
If you do not have the clock, then piece of paper and written time is also OK.
I definitely rented a car in Switzerland before pandemic that did not have the disk and I had to buy it at some tourist info center.
The apps are similar, and you can use one of several apps, issued by several different private companies (who also maintain their own parking spaces). Some places, however, finding the nearest meter, or payment machine to be more accurate, can be a bit of a trek, so it's not super convenient, if you don't use the app, like me.
But the new versions are easier for the governments. Here they have cars driving around with cameras automatically checking the license plates to see if you paid.
Then someone made a device that would form a network in all the cars using them to detect the cars in advance so you can quickly pay via your app, but the judge blocked them.
Humans being human
In my town (small town near Paris), in some places downtown we have machines that scan the licence plates; first 30 minutes are free, and if you stay longer you get a ticket; everything is automated and doesn't involve anyone for enforcement.
And elsewhere in France there are parking machines where you pay using a credit/debit card and type in your licence plate, and there are patrol cars that scan all the plates and match them to those in the database with date/time, and if they have overstayed the ticket is sent automatically.
(Yes, this particular design only works if your goal is to increase turnover for parking spaces, rather than to collect revenue for parking spaces. But a lot of the time that is the goal, and yet we use the design that collects revenue anyway.)
When most people do the right thing without being prompted, simple solutions are easy.
On a visit to Denmark I saw their simple system. You car has a plastic clock face mounted on the inside of the windshield. When you park, you set the clock hands to the current time. Parking enforcement then knows how long the car has been there. If you try to cheat and set a later time, and get caught, you get a fine. If you overstay the time limit, you get a fine.
No meters, no coin collection, no apps, no accounts, no personal data. Very simple and effective.