This particular design also only works in a high-trust, high-honesty culture. The complexities of most systems like this are only there to disincentivize bad actors from taking advantage of the system, and as we all know, managing incentives is a difficult problem.
When most people do the right thing without being prompted, simple solutions are easy.
(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.)