7 ms·

That's cute, but wrong. Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets, so it makes sense to budget for them. You may

That's cute, but wrong. Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets, so it makes sense to budget for them. You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
Sure, but nothing precludes it from actually being the case that they really do operate that way. They can even mount your defense! It's perfect.
chrisseaton 8y ago
> Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. They aren’t random or accidental.
- closeparen 8y ago
  In a crowded urban neighborhood, there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop. Unless the delivery company refuses to service the area, it’s going to do some double parking. Downtowns address this problem with yellow commercial loading zones but those don’t really exist in residential neighborhoods.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Then, the delivery trucks shouldn't be parking there. Clear a spot and turn it into commercial parking only, i say. They're doing this right now on Polk street and it's so much safer for bicyclists on the portions that have this now.
    - jimmaswell 8y ago
      A short detour on a sidewalk or grass/dirt shoulder doesn't seem that dangerous to me. Does it happen much that there's no room on the right and the cyclist has to go around the left of the truck?
      - komali2 8y ago
        There's a couple reasons that this dangerous enough that converting some street parking to commercial load/unload is a better solution: 1. There's no quick conversion in the middle of the street. It's a curb, which would require hopping, which is nearly impossible for an ebike and a dangerously unstable maneuver anyway. 2. There are cars blocking visibility with the sidewalk. If you hop onto it, you might strike a pedestrian you didn't see. Perhaps a short one, such as a child, who are unpredictable anyway. 3. Going to the right of the truck is a great way to get doored in the 0" of clearance between the truck and other parked cars. If it's the truck, enjoy your guaranteed head injury from the truck door 3 feet off the ground. 4. Biking on the sidewalk is illegal in many cities. So is parking in the bike lane, for that matter. Expecting one party to break the law because of a failure to enforce a separate law is unreasonable.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Would you do this to every block in the Sunset?
      - komali2 8y ago
        Yes. Why not? Add more busses and trams. Sunset houses have garages, many driveways, much of which is stuffed with junk and undriven cars. Perhaps they are supersaturated with cars? The "no cars in the city" philosophy is not one without challenges or setbacks - getting rid of parking in sunset would suck, but it would motivate the creation of more and better public transit, which is a better solution than cars by nearly all marks.
        closeparen 8y ago
        The N is reliably overcrowded, and transportation funding measures are reliably passing. Is the problem really a lack of demand?
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    > there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop So they shouldn’t stop there then. Deliver the last mile on foot or using a cart. If it’s too large for that I guess you can get some kind of permit like they do for construction.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - MikeTheGreat 8y ago
    The companies could also hire a second person to actually run the deliveries inside while the driver makes sure not to block traffic. It'll cost more than the current situation, sure, but it is an option.
    - Operyl 8y ago
      This happens during busy times of year, like Christmas.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Ye. Service vehicles usually are exempted from the actual parking rules in practice. A sewage utility vehicle wont get ticketed if it has a pipe going down a adjacent drain and has the wheels on the sidewalk etc. Walking from a free parking spot to the delivery location is not included in the price. Unless all delivery companies are forced to follow the parking laws (for real) at the same time they will just go out of business. The problem is that the end user don't know what quality of delivery they will get, so they choose the cheapest, and there is a race to the bottom, like flight tickets. When comparing prices the end user doesn't know that they might be beaten off the plane by security to make room for a business class late arrival end user, so the risk is not priced in correctly ...
    - pofilat 8y ago
      Surely that sewage pump operator obtained a permit to block the street that day?
      - closeparen 8y ago
        A permit doesn’t change the level of inconvenience for other road users.
  - gpm 8y ago
    If you can't operate legally, that doesn't mean you get to break the law, that means you stop operating.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      So start having internet retailers and takeout restaurants say “we don’t serve your street because it has a bike lane” and see how the long the bike lane lasts.
      - gpm 8y ago
        Yes, that is what should happen. More likely than getting rid of the bike lane, the laws surrounding it will be amended to allow deliveries.
- pointytrees 8y ago
  My brother-in-law lives in LA, and parks there every day. He honestly tries not to get parking tickets, but he's been towed once or twice because the street wasn't clear. I know he isn't intentionally trying to break the law. I also got a parking ticket when visiting once. I very carefully looked at the signs, there were 2 other cars on that side of the street. I parked there, and went into visit thinking I was fine. I got back to a parking ticket, and looked at the sign again, and had Monday/Tuesday mixed up. I didn't intend to break the law. It is accidental.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    I get the impression LA and others do this on purpose as a revenue tactic.
    - ravenstine 8y ago
      Last I looked up, the city of LA makes somewhere around 200 million a year on parking fines alone. There's tons of places in LA where it appears safe to park, but then you come back to find a ticket on your windshield because there's a sign way off in the distance and obscured by a tree. Parking enforcement "officers" are specifically told to never make exceptions, and their little ticket machines are designed so that, once your license plate is entered, the action can't be undone and they are forced to complete the ticket in order to continue doing their job.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Shit happens; signs are confusing, drivers make mistakes, cops make mistakes. And that may be a once in a lifetime event for a regular driver, but when you have thousands of drivers parking dozens of times a day, "once in a lifetime" becomes "once a week".
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    Except very special and rare situations, the driver should be personally liable for a ticket even if on the job. Traffic laws apply to individual drivers and not vehicle owners or contractors.
    - rwmj 8y ago
      I have a friend who works as a driver (merchandising, not delivery) and he personally pays for his parking tickets. This is in the UK though, maybe things are different in the US.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      Parking tickets are not moving violations, and are typically assigned to the car, not to the driver, for obvious reasons.
- sowbug 8y ago
  Parking violations usually don't require proof of intent. So unless you believe people never make mistakes and are always fully knowledgeable about parking rules, then tickets are sometimes random (or at least capricious) and accidental.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. Incorrect; if you don't park illegally, you are less likely to be ticketed each time you park. On an individual scale, this might result in never getting a ticket, on a large delivery company’s scale, it's pretty much guaranteed not to.
- dahfizz 8y ago
  If you park millions of trucks perfectly legally across the country, you will almost certainly get erroneous tickets. Traffic wardens are not infallible - that's why we have traffic court.
- ascar 8y ago
  The GP was talking about a delivery company budgeting for tickets. All the answers to the parent miss the point. The discussion is on a large scale with a significant amount of tickets. If it's a hundred tickets for 1,000 drivers a year, that's a few thousand bucks for a multi-million dollar salary. Doesn't something like that run under miscellaneous and isn't explicitly budgeted for?
  - pofilat 8y ago
    If they don't budget it, then is shows that they don't care about parking tickets at all, they just pay whatever. Budgeting it shows they are tracking tickets which is a necessary component of reducing ticket counts. Rhetoric is fun; it's easy to prove both a proposition and its opposite.
- stordoff 8y ago
  Mistakes happen. My grandparents got one because the sign was a good 50m away (a long way for a disabled driver) and looked like it was referring to another part of the road, and my mother got one when she stopped for 20s to pick me up from somewhere (yes there was a sign, but she hadn't even been stopped long enough to read it).
- xbmcuser 8y ago
  You should watch a few episodes of caught in providence on youtube. Shows how traffic tickets can be given out wrongly or some laws are simply too hard to follow.
- jon-wood 8y ago
  I used to work for a delivery company on the software side. Our drivers were responsible for paying their own tickets, and there’d still be one or two a month.
danellis 8y ago
"You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law." Why? Doing everything correctly and within the law costs money.
Judgmentality 8y ago
Don't the parking tickets have to be paid by the driver though, and not the company? FedEx doesn't even own their delivery trucks, the drivers do.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  Parking tickets are against the registered owner. Moving violations are against the driver.
  - Judgmentality 8y ago
    So in the cases where the drivers don't own the delivery vehicles, just deduct the fines from whoever was driving it at the time of the ticket. I admittedly have no idea how these situations are handled by accounting, but that seems like it would be the solution to me.
    - ascar 8y ago
      The solution is the company just pays the ticket. End of story.
      - jdironman 8y ago
        The solution should be repeat offenses equals harsher consequences.
        pofilat 8y ago
        You are still blaming the laborer for management's policies re (not) allocating sufficient time for correct work.
        jandrese 8y ago
        Or the city's completely insufficient parking situation. But yes, the company looks at this like so: * Option 1. Park in front of the building (illegally) and deliver the package. 2% chance of getting a $200 parking ticket. * Option 2. Driver finds a legal spot, average time: 15 minutes. Add 20 minutes of walking time to the delivery. Requirement: 8x more delivery vehicles required to service the city. Option 1 is much cheaper.
amptorn 8y ago
> You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law. The only reason to have a lawyer is because you broke the law, got it.

james_s_tayler 8y ago

Sure, but nothing precludes it from actually being the case that they really do operate that way. They can even mount your defense! It's perfect.

chrisseaton 8y ago

> Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. They aren’t random or accidental.

closeparen 8y ago
In a crowded urban neighborhood, there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop. Unless the delivery company refuses to service the area, it’s going to do some double parking. Downtowns address this problem with yellow commercial loading zones but those don’t really exist in residential neighborhoods.
- komali2 8y ago
  Then, the delivery trucks shouldn't be parking there. Clear a spot and turn it into commercial parking only, i say. They're doing this right now on Polk street and it's so much safer for bicyclists on the portions that have this now.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    A short detour on a sidewalk or grass/dirt shoulder doesn't seem that dangerous to me. Does it happen much that there's no room on the right and the cyclist has to go around the left of the truck?
    - komali2 8y ago
      There's a couple reasons that this dangerous enough that converting some street parking to commercial load/unload is a better solution: 1. There's no quick conversion in the middle of the street. It's a curb, which would require hopping, which is nearly impossible for an ebike and a dangerously unstable maneuver anyway. 2. There are cars blocking visibility with the sidewalk. If you hop onto it, you might strike a pedestrian you didn't see. Perhaps a short one, such as a child, who are unpredictable anyway. 3. Going to the right of the truck is a great way to get doored in the 0" of clearance between the truck and other parked cars. If it's the truck, enjoy your guaranteed head injury from the truck door 3 feet off the ground. 4. Biking on the sidewalk is illegal in many cities. So is parking in the bike lane, for that matter. Expecting one party to break the law because of a failure to enforce a separate law is unreasonable.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Would you do this to every block in the Sunset?
    - komali2 8y ago
      Yes. Why not? Add more busses and trams. Sunset houses have garages, many driveways, much of which is stuffed with junk and undriven cars. Perhaps they are supersaturated with cars? The "no cars in the city" philosophy is not one without challenges or setbacks - getting rid of parking in sunset would suck, but it would motivate the creation of more and better public transit, which is a better solution than cars by nearly all marks.
      - closeparen 8y ago
        The N is reliably overcrowded, and transportation funding measures are reliably passing. Is the problem really a lack of demand?
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop So they shouldn’t stop there then. Deliver the last mile on foot or using a cart. If it’s too large for that I guess you can get some kind of permit like they do for construction.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- MikeTheGreat 8y ago
  The companies could also hire a second person to actually run the deliveries inside while the driver makes sure not to block traffic. It'll cost more than the current situation, sure, but it is an option.
  - Operyl 8y ago
    This happens during busy times of year, like Christmas.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Ye. Service vehicles usually are exempted from the actual parking rules in practice. A sewage utility vehicle wont get ticketed if it has a pipe going down a adjacent drain and has the wheels on the sidewalk etc. Walking from a free parking spot to the delivery location is not included in the price. Unless all delivery companies are forced to follow the parking laws (for real) at the same time they will just go out of business. The problem is that the end user don't know what quality of delivery they will get, so they choose the cheapest, and there is a race to the bottom, like flight tickets. When comparing prices the end user doesn't know that they might be beaten off the plane by security to make room for a business class late arrival end user, so the risk is not priced in correctly ...
  - pofilat 8y ago
    Surely that sewage pump operator obtained a permit to block the street that day?
    - closeparen 8y ago
      A permit doesn’t change the level of inconvenience for other road users.
- gpm 8y ago
  If you can't operate legally, that doesn't mean you get to break the law, that means you stop operating.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    So start having internet retailers and takeout restaurants say “we don’t serve your street because it has a bike lane” and see how the long the bike lane lasts.
    - gpm 8y ago
      Yes, that is what should happen. More likely than getting rid of the bike lane, the laws surrounding it will be amended to allow deliveries.
pointytrees 8y ago
My brother-in-law lives in LA, and parks there every day. He honestly tries not to get parking tickets, but he's been towed once or twice because the street wasn't clear. I know he isn't intentionally trying to break the law. I also got a parking ticket when visiting once. I very carefully looked at the signs, there were 2 other cars on that side of the street. I parked there, and went into visit thinking I was fine. I got back to a parking ticket, and looked at the sign again, and had Monday/Tuesday mixed up. I didn't intend to break the law. It is accidental.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  I get the impression LA and others do this on purpose as a revenue tactic.
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    Last I looked up, the city of LA makes somewhere around 200 million a year on parking fines alone. There's tons of places in LA where it appears safe to park, but then you come back to find a ticket on your windshield because there's a sign way off in the distance and obscured by a tree. Parking enforcement "officers" are specifically told to never make exceptions, and their little ticket machines are designed so that, once your license plate is entered, the action can't be undone and they are forced to complete the ticket in order to continue doing their job.
icebraining 8y ago
Shit happens; signs are confusing, drivers make mistakes, cops make mistakes. And that may be a once in a lifetime event for a regular driver, but when you have thousands of drivers parking dozens of times a day, "once in a lifetime" becomes "once a week".
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  Except very special and rare situations, the driver should be personally liable for a ticket even if on the job. Traffic laws apply to individual drivers and not vehicle owners or contractors.
  - rwmj 8y ago
    I have a friend who works as a driver (merchandising, not delivery) and he personally pays for his parking tickets. This is in the UK though, maybe things are different in the US.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Parking tickets are not moving violations, and are typically assigned to the car, not to the driver, for obvious reasons.
sowbug 8y ago
Parking violations usually don't require proof of intent. So unless you believe people never make mistakes and are always fully knowledgeable about parking rules, then tickets are sometimes random (or at least capricious) and accidental.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. Incorrect; if you don't park illegally, you are less likely to be ticketed each time you park. On an individual scale, this might result in never getting a ticket, on a large delivery company’s scale, it's pretty much guaranteed not to.
dahfizz 8y ago
If you park millions of trucks perfectly legally across the country, you will almost certainly get erroneous tickets. Traffic wardens are not infallible - that's why we have traffic court.
ascar 8y ago
The GP was talking about a delivery company budgeting for tickets. All the answers to the parent miss the point. The discussion is on a large scale with a significant amount of tickets. If it's a hundred tickets for 1,000 drivers a year, that's a few thousand bucks for a multi-million dollar salary. Doesn't something like that run under miscellaneous and isn't explicitly budgeted for?
- pofilat 8y ago
  If they don't budget it, then is shows that they don't care about parking tickets at all, they just pay whatever. Budgeting it shows they are tracking tickets which is a necessary component of reducing ticket counts. Rhetoric is fun; it's easy to prove both a proposition and its opposite.
stordoff 8y ago
Mistakes happen. My grandparents got one because the sign was a good 50m away (a long way for a disabled driver) and looked like it was referring to another part of the road, and my mother got one when she stopped for 20s to pick me up from somewhere (yes there was a sign, but she hadn't even been stopped long enough to read it).
xbmcuser 8y ago
You should watch a few episodes of caught in providence on youtube. Shows how traffic tickets can be given out wrongly or some laws are simply too hard to follow.
jon-wood 8y ago
I used to work for a delivery company on the software side. Our drivers were responsible for paying their own tickets, and there’d still be one or two a month.

danellis 8y ago

"You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law." Why? Doing everything correctly and within the law costs money.

Judgmentality 8y ago

Don't the parking tickets have to be paid by the driver though, and not the company? FedEx doesn't even own their delivery trucks, the drivers do.

xfitm3 8y ago
Parking tickets are against the registered owner. Moving violations are against the driver.
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  So in the cases where the drivers don't own the delivery vehicles, just deduct the fines from whoever was driving it at the time of the ticket. I admittedly have no idea how these situations are handled by accounting, but that seems like it would be the solution to me.
  - ascar 8y ago
    The solution is the company just pays the ticket. End of story.
    - jdironman 8y ago
      The solution should be repeat offenses equals harsher consequences.
      - pofilat 8y ago
        You are still blaming the laborer for management's policies re (not) allocating sufficient time for correct work.
        jandrese 8y ago
        Or the city's completely insufficient parking situation. But yes, the company looks at this like so: * Option 1. Park in front of the building (illegally) and deliver the package. 2% chance of getting a $200 parking ticket. * Option 2. Driver finds a legal spot, average time: 15 minutes. Add 20 minutes of walking time to the delivery. Requirement: 8x more delivery vehicles required to service the city. Option 1 is much cheaper.

amptorn 8y ago

> You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law. The only reason to have a lawyer is because you broke the law, got it.