Is OU's campus a drive-up college or more walkable/bikeable? Never been there.
Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
261–270 of 375 posts
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#262OK, the actual design of the thing where it just uses suction is incredibly idiotic, but the kid who got free wireless internet for months by taking its sim card - that's pretty brilliant.
The alternative, tire boots, are equally asinine and more likely to damage the car. These seem fractionally better up to the point where they are hacked. Unessarily connected devices are a liability beyond measure, and it floors me that nobody seems to notice.
This is a stupid question, but something I’ve always wondered about is how tow trucks disengage the clutch and/or the parking brake... am I to understand that they simply don’t? So if I park my manual transmission car in reverse and with the parking brake on, they’re just going to literally drag my car to their lot or destroy my gearbox? How is this not a bigger issue?
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#263Whatever happened to parking permits, parking officers, and parking tickets?
Yeah, I'm wondering the same thing.
Over here,I've never seen boots, barnacles or any such devices. Refusing to pay your ticket is just like not paying your bills. They'll send a reminder bill to your home address a few times,just in case you have forgotten or misplaced the bill/ticket, then it's over to some company that specializes in getting people to pay unpaid bills, and eventually if you still refuse you end up in court and the government makes you pay one way or another.
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#264Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong? An alternative headline could be something like, "Entitled College Kids Learn How To Keep Parking Like Assholes Without Paying Fines." And it's a pyrhic victory anyway, because chances are now the cars will get one of the metal tire boots put on, or get towed. Both of which are more expensive and a bigger hassle for everybody.
> Both of which are more expensive and a bigger hassle for everybody. That's the point. The university was crowing about how they deployed 40000 of these things already. They wouldn't be able to tow 40000 people as easily.
You hit the nail on the head. It's not about enforcement it's ease of collecting money.
Me and my wife had to fight a ticket at one point for a spot we had paid for. No ryme or reason the lot was just grabbing revenue by literally stealing from customers with small tickets that they thought would not be challenged because
- you can have your license revoked for non payment of tickets
- you aren't entitled to a court hearing for a parking ticket so fighting it means figuring out how to handle it yourself or hiring an attorney to fight $30 tickets.
The best model for interactions in capitalism is predator prey wherein virtually no one is actually thinking of the system as a whole and sane conditions are only apparent as an emergent property of adversarial interactions.
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#265My SUS company, EasyALPR focuses on commercial parking enforcement / vehicle control. First, the people who get "in trouble" are often absolutely brazen in their unfair use of common parking. They're warned multiple times and even when given a "last chance" notice they'll just keep breaking rules. At that point you have to TOW them. And let me tell you, a TOW is something you can't lampoon or get free internet off of…
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Quite an accusation, but I'll bite.
The alternative to this solution is literally a clipboard and excel that doesn't really work. Allowing parking patrollers to capture photos and coordinates allows secretaries to avoid sometimes violent confrontations and I'm happy about that.
As for oppressing poor people, the great majority of people who I've seen get towed thanks to record keeping by EasyALPR are parking at commercial business parks. These are out in the suburbs and serve everything from medical offices to joe schmoe SEO company.
The most common violation is people parking in two hour parking for 3+ hours or all day. The parking is free, but it is restricted to two hours. (This is actually a very difficult thing to enforce regularly manually)
At the site I'm thinking of, there is actually longer term parking also free nearby for this facility, but people don't want to walk so they keep seeing if they can get away with abusing the closer short term parking. It is even allowed to move your vehicle to get two more hours for free, they just don't care.
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#266OK, the actual design of the thing where it just uses suction is incredibly idiotic, but the kid who got free wireless internet for months by taking its sim card - that's pretty brilliant.
The alternative, tire boots, are equally asinine and more likely to damage the car. These seem fractionally better up to the point where they are hacked. Unessarily connected devices are a liability beyond measure, and it floors me that nobody seems to notice.
It's substantially worse because the easier and cheaper it is to extract revenue from you the more people will do it.
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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How would they go about doing what you suggest, and separating the good of confronting scofflaws from the bad effects of oppressing poor people?
This is higher level than this question, but I actually think the entire individual ownership of vehicles and having them the only viable method for getting to work for many as fundamentally broken.
So while I operate this tool that enforces a thing, I don't own a car myself and I honestly can't wait for some autonomous fleet-based future where parking lots are torn up and streets are wider and safer for bicycles and alternative transportation vehicles.
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#268Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#269My SUS company, EasyALPR focuses on commercial parking enforcement / vehicle control. First, the people who get "in trouble" are often absolutely brazen in their unfair use of common parking. They're warned multiple times and even when given a "last chance" notice they'll just keep breaking rules. At that point you have to TOW them. And let me tell you, a TOW is something you can't lampoon or get free internet off of…
Not all heroes wear capes. Thank you on behalf of all those administrators having to deal with the abuse! PS: Do you have stats on the overlap between parking violators and people who refuse to pick up after their dogs?
:) I would not be surprised if there was great overlap. Probably correlates with people who throw their cigarette butts on the sidewalk. :P
Re: Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet
#270The cards are heavily stacked against anything that uses suction to clamp on. Basically any leak of atmospheric pressure into the suction voids, and it's game over.
You can't easily prevent the the entry of sharp, thin blades between the device's case and the vehicle glass. You will never get a good enough fit on all shapes of windshield.
The kinds of contraptions I can think of that could guard the gap between the device's case and the glass could be damaging to the glass (for instance, spring-loaded steel plates around the perimeter of the device, perpendicular to the glass).
What would work would be putting a large sticker on the glass, which is cross-hatched by numerous cuts so that it has to be peeled off in half-centimeter-sized slivers.
Instead of a fine, you get a notice with a phone number: for a $180 fee and an hour or two, a sticker specialist will painstakingly peel everything off. You are under no obligation to use that service, but if your car is not out of there by a certain time, it will be towed.
I.e. nobody has any shortcut to get the thing off; it's as hard for them as for you.