The goal of fines is meant to be to discourage specific problematic behaviours, like parking where it would cause problems for the fire department.
When the goal becomes to cause the behaviour more often so that your can collect more fines, the entire system is just fundamentally broken.
A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour. Paint the curb bright red, for starters.
This is why the basic solution of calling the firefighters out to break the windows of the vehicle and run a hose through it is more an actual solution.
Apparently it worked to get the Soviet diplomats to stop parking in front of hydrants.
You don't need to get out the hoses to break the windows. You just need to have the FD drive by and break the windows, then receive an unexpected higher priority call so they just jump back on the truck and drive away to that next call. Hell, you don't even need to send a truck. Allow the citizens to take civic pride in their city and institute a "no charges will be brought" type of situations for breaking windows of cars illegally parked in front of hydrants.
> Allow the citizens to take civic pride in their city and institute a "no charges will be brought" type of situations for breaking windows of cars illegally parked in front of hydrants.
Fun. Then we get kids putting a cardboard box over the hydrant and playing "what box?" after smashing your windows.
Varies by municipality: when parking anywhere, look for blue reflectors in the middle of the road. There's usually one or two per street. They denote where the fire hydrants are so the FD can easily find them when cars block curbside visibility. You can use the same feature to avoid hidden hydrants yourself.
>look for blue reflectors in the middle of the road.
In marching band, we referred to those as Smurf Shit, and the drum captain would whack the snare a particular way to let the rest of the band know of its presence so nobody tripped over it
> A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour. Paint the curb bright red, for starters.
That would still not really align incentives. If a particular action (parking next to a fire hydrant) produced revenue for that department, they will be financially incentivized to encourage more of that action, not less of it.
If the government somehow lost money rather than gained money when someone did something naughty, then maybe they'd work to try to reduce that naughty behavior.
In Royal Oak, MI, the city recently contracted Municipal Parking Services, a Minnesota-based company, to install a new parking system which reads plates and automatically issues fines after a 5-minute grace period (mailed to your house.) The system is a bit confusing and unexpected to visitors.
A DDA study determined that 43% of visitors were being fined.
As a result of getting ticketed, I've heard many people in Michigan say they won't visit Royal Oak anymore.
So I guess that's one way to discentivize yourself.
> The goal of fines is to discourage ... When the goal becomes ... collect more fines,... the entire system is just fundamentally broken.
Your assumption is that fines discourage. If fines discourage, and the goal is to maximize discouragement, that will occur when fines are maximized.
...unless you think the fines are so large that we've gone past the peak discouragement point, where people are so scared of the fines that they no longer maximize their misbehavior. In this case, if we decrease fines, revenue to the city will increase! the Laffer parking curve!
The solution is to never have the agency giving the fine benefiting from the fine.
The best solution (and, no, I'm not joking) would be destroy all funds raised in government fines, nationwide. Send the fines directly to the Federal Reserve balance sheet.
Fines generally suck anyway, because they allow people that can easily afford them to break the law.
Replace all fines (and most jail time) with community service, defined as something like "hours signed off by the director of any 501(c)(3)." Cut government programs that are now unnecessary because of all the community service.
The supply of community service hours is decentralized and 501(c)(3) organizations have limited input into law enforcement, so the government has less incentive to increase non-compliance to increase citations.
Also fun to see the entire C-suite of a company get 1000 hours of community service each instead of a fine paid by shareholders whose only mistake was hiring them.
If you wanted to try to design a system to let nepo-babies get out of any crime short of a felony with zero punishment it would be hard to imagine a system better than that.
I can form a 501c3 today, and as long as it doesn't funnel earnings to an individual (other than a very lavish salary) I could let people 'donate' their time at one of my community service parties, pay me a small fee, and issue a small donation to some local cause.
No, budgets get rearranged to put the money towards other items when certain items can pay for themselves like this. There's only so much money raised via taxes. Income via fines is an unlimited well to be tapped by those with the creativity to find them
> A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour.
Then how will they be able to milk the citizens for millions a year? It's in their best interest to keep everything as confusing as possible so they can trap as many people as they can.
When the goal becomes to cause the behaviour more often so that your can collect more fines, the entire system is just fundamentally broken.
A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour. Paint the curb bright red, for starters.