It’s just not so that street sweeping tickets work at keeping the street clear for sweeping. They don’t. Those tickets are high by my standard but, in the grand scheme of things, are pretty low. I’ve seen people just accept and pay those tickets for months on end, never moving the car, as debris accumulates behind it and eventually promises to escape down to the sewer drain and cause a problem. You couldn’t raise them high enough to discourage such abuse unless you raised them so high that they would be unfair to most people who just get such tickets by accident every now and again. Red tagging and removal is a more appropriate incentive.

So, why not 7 days instead of 3? Or maybe 10 or 14 days? That I don’t feel too strongly about.

Come on, some people actually think this is a good law? It’s just a way fro the city to randomly raise money.

I live on a block, where all of the neighbors actually get alone. We wouldn’t tattle on one another’s cars….but about half of us don’t have driveways. It’s a mixed use block – mostly homes, a few apartment buildings, MANY duplexes, many homes with no driveway.

Ummm..yeah, I might park in front of my neighbor’s house. It’s not THEIR space. It’s OUR street parking. Ditto if they park near my house. On average, I park about 3/4 of a block from my front door unless it’s a Saturday. Good enough fro me!

I’ve had friends in the nearby Berkeley hills tell me about people getting annoyed fi someone parks near their house and feeling as if the space right in front of their house is “theirs”. Come on, get a life – those folks need something real to worry about.

But forcing the people who LIVE here to move there car randomly for no good reason every 72 hours is NUTS!

We are near to two BART stations, and I often go many days without driving – as do my neighbors. When I go on vacation for a week, I should get to leave my car on MY street. I think if it’s within some number of meters of one’s home, then it should NOT be 72 hours. Maybe more like 10 days. It’s not like I want to force a neighbor to move my car for NO GOOD REASON!

The 72 hour rule doesn’ t help clear the street for street sweeping. That was a dumb comment. Getting a fat ticket on street sweeping days clears the street for street sweeping.

I feel like this law is a very strange one. Having an inoperable vehicle sitting out on the street for days on end could be covered by having a rule that is say 7 or 10 or 14 days, instead of **3 days***.

We already have “two hour permits” required – so it’s not like random folks are parking their cars here who don’t live or work nearby.

You wrote: “For now, accept that BPD will enforce the 72 hr limit on cars that have been REPORTED and then CONFIRMED by the officer as unmoved for over 72 hours. If it is registered to a nearby home, I’m sure the officer will attempt contact to get the car moved.”

You are mistaken. The pattern I saw in the case I saw was of one neighbor whose car sat for months and months, inoperable, *next to* a resident of the same building whose car was repeatedly called in for small amounts of over-parking. In the case at hand, because there was then an ongoing dispute between these two neighbors, it is not a bad guess that the one whose car was never cited was the one calling in the complaints about the car repeatedly cited. At no point did the police make any attempt whatsoever to contact the owner of the repeatedly cited car, other than the red sign posted on the car. At no point did the police take any notice of the other, much more egregiously over-parked car – even in spite of its having receiving street-sweeping citations for many months running without ever once moving (and while accumulating a lot of detritus around it).

My observations are these:

- Streets including parking spaces are public resources owned by the city. The land is owned by everyone. It is a “commons.” The use of this land needs to be regulated so that it is both efficient and equitable. We individually don’t “own” on street parking spaces whether it be in front of our house, down the street on our block or any where else. It seems reasonable to me to limit the length of time a vehicle can be parked in one place. Individuals shouldn’t be able to hog it.

Some environmental advocates have argued that free on street parking is implicitly a big subsidy for people who own and operate cars. While this might be a majority of households in Berkeley, people without cars end up being shorted. While its great that people who rely on their feet, bicycles or transit but still own a car, drive less than others, if they park on the street they are getting a subsidy. Car sharing might be one way to address this problem.

- There can be no expectation of privacy on the street. If its on the street, it isn’t private by definition.

- The 72 hour limit isn’t really 72 hours. My experience with this is that neighbors will call after a few days of seeing an unfamilar car parked in the neighborhood. Then the police come within a day or so to place a warning tag on it. Only then does the 72 hour (3 day) clock start to run. Then the police come within a day or so of the end of the 72 hours to ticket and to arrange for the car to be towed. If the car is moved before it is ticketed, the timeline starts over. Unless there’s an over enthusiastic neighbor, the parking limit is closer to a week than 3 days. I think that’s reasonably long enough for one car to occupy one publicly owned space.

In broad strokes, I share your concerns about Big Brother – just not in the details of the substance of what I proposed. The cameras mounted on enforcement carts aren’t monitored by persons. They are aimed so as to capture license plates so unlikely to capture much else. There is no need for data retention beyond, say, a week – except in cases of violation. On top of that the auxiliary functions I mentioned (e.g., flagging plugged up sewer drains) is likely to be functionality under the control of a human operator (for which purposes the camera is an ancillary convenience – all that’s needed for that is the GPS component and the computer). This all seems fairly banal.

For big brother concerns, compare and contrast to, for example, Google street-view cars with their 360-degree cameras, indefinitely long data retention, public disclosure, etc. I’d be more worried about the private sector becoming Big Brother at this level. At least with government, we have a theoretical potential to establish transparency in the operation of the data collection.

The “green police” video you link to is amusing – thanks – but I don’t think it leads one to the conclusion that Berkeley should not do routine air quality and sonic quality monitoring if it is cheap and easy to do so.

You mention Mr. Wozniak’s analysis. I find one objectionable aspect of it and a different aspect that supports my proposal for cameras:

The objectionable part is, of course, the treatment of parking enforcement as a revenue source to be administered to maximize return on investment. Yes, I know that this attitude is commonplace in nearly every city in the country and yet that doesn’t make it ethical. Policing is not a for profit business, it is a regulatory function undertaken for public benefit. We don’t chalk cars in unmetered spaces to turn a buck – we chalk them (or should chalk them) to ensure that residential permit holders get their reasonable and sanctified-in-law due preferential access. I’m not absolutist in this – I don’t mind the City turning *some* profit here (better than the alternative) but the aim is not that profit, it’s the fair and agreed upon administration of parking rights.

Mr. Wozniak does suggest that the cameras could be a very good investment when he mentions the issue of repetitive stress injuries from chalking. With the cameras, that problem would go away. Also, enforcement officers could process more miles per hour thereby helping to relieve his concerns about the cost of enforcing in non-metered areas.

I had a vehicle towed in TX for this violation of 3 days, with nothing posted on the vehicle, and have heard of this in other states.

Don’t blame Berkeley- and don’t blame the complaint driven process. Sue the people making fraudulent claims, and adhere to the law.