I was reminded of this when I read a “Shower thoughts” post about clocks.
Where I live, there usually is free parking outside of stores and malls, but limited to a short time, such as 15 minutes or a couple of hours. People have parking discs that they rotate to show when they arrived, and put the discs up visible behind their windshields in their cars.
I have an automatic parking timer displayed in my windshield, that shows the time when I parked rounded up to the nearest half/whole hour. It’s a ”set and forget” thing, which auto adjusts to daylight savings. However, it speeds up 1 - 2 minutes a week, which I didn’t see as it rounds up the time, but I found out after a few months.
Once after parking, I took a quick dash into the store, took maybe 5 minutes. When I got back I had received a fine for the equivalent of 80 € for ”parking for 23 hours in a 2 hour spot”. They apparently don’t have to wait five minutes to write out the ticket if the parking timer was so off.
I didn’t contest the ticket, I considered it a learning experience and a reminder to never blindly trust technology.
I am confused. Why did you get charged for 23 hours, when you were only there for 5 minutes? Even for a bot that’s a massive mistake to make.
In large parts of Europe, the onus is on the car driver/owner to follow the parking rules, either the common street ones or the privately owned ones.
I can’t remember the exact time I parked any more, but let’s say I parked at 10:25. If I had a manual parking disc/timer, I would have set the time manually to 10:30. Then I would have been able to park for two hours from the time on my parking disc/timer.
My automatic timer had crept forward for some weeks, so when I parked it rounded off to one hour later, 11:30, which I didn’t think of to check.
When the parking attendant went by my car, he/she looked at the current time, and the time my parking disc/timer showed was one hour later than the current time. And as they don’t show date of parking, I was in the wrong for
a) having parked there the previous day, or
b) having set the time wrong on purpose, which is also a finable offense.
It showed let’s say 12 o’clock when they arrived at 11 o’clock meaning they must have been there for 23 hours.
The tickets are not written up by robots but by someone checking the time on the parking disc.
Sometimes people manually set their parking discs a bit forward so that they have a bit more time but if they get checked in that time frame the ticket is even more expensive than if they overstayed an hour.