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.
TIL these are even a thing
This is the analogue version of what OP is describing, VERY common here.
Wow, that’s frustrating. I’ve never heard of such a device. Why is it up to you to proclaim how long you’ve been parking there? Where do you live? Everywhere I’ve been (in the US) it’s up to parking enforcement to determine if a car has been there too long or not.
In France, maybe other places in Europe, some parking spots require you to have a “parking disc” as we call it, set to your time of arrival.
What stops people from lying about when they arrived?
Got a pic of said disc, I’ve never heard of such disc, but am slightly intrigued by it.
The parking disc commonly looks like this:
The sign that states times for free parking can look like this:
.My parking disc is digital and once I set the current time and date it’s supposed to be a set-and-forget as it automatically sets the (rounded up) time to when I arrived:
