I don’t have a problem with the ones towing from clearly marked spots, but some places are pretty sneaky at hiding their signs or filling them with fine print.
And the ones on the highways can be outright bandits.
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Man, I dunno, parking in busy areas is a huge pain in the ass. I went to a place near down town to watch Spirited Away on the big screen, and there was parking everywhere - empty - but each lot had private parking - towing signs. Even my gimp tag wouldn’t help me. After circling the area for 10 min, I found parking on the street and walked 3 blocks.
Well, that would make sense. Judging by past behaviour, it’s not what will happen.
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Not parking is the whole point, they’ll just wander aimlessly, clogging the streets.
“even after factoring in energy, depreciation, wear and tear, and maintenance, cruising may only cost 29 to 50 cents per hour. His computer models suggest that as few as 2,000 empty self-driving cars in downtown San Francisco may slow traffic to less than 2 miles per hour.”
How Self-Driving Cars Might Transform City Parking - IEEE Spectrum
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Really? Because, ironically, I used both of these when teaching a kid to drive to outline the importance of signs, and being aware of what’s going on. There are a number of very instructive incidents you can find on 11foot8 where a car was following too closely and nearly became involved, one where a truck was backing up and backed into another vehicle, etc. You can choose to construe these as not having any sort of positive contribution to make, of course, but that doesn’t make it so.
I find that I prefer to learn by observing the mistakes others make, and then hopefully learning from that without making the mistake firsthand. I am sure others watch these things exclusively for the perverse entertainment. That does not mean all viewers are there exclusively for the perverse entertainment.
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A line has been drawn, choose your side! Neutrality, playfulness, contemplation? There is no place for these in Internet Judgement Wars, only the relentless clash of 
and 
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As a younger man I had a job climbing tall and large structures to pressure wash and clean them, typically using pressure washers in the 10,000-12,000 PSI range (they’ll cut you to the bone) to clean and remove paint. My excitement about consumer grade pressure washers has been a little flaccid ever since.
Also, if you hit a 2 foot deep welded sheet metal groin that filled with pigeon shit and then was painted over a decade before with a 10,000 PSI water stream, it will explode like a claymore mine, and get in every orifice of your face.
Projectile vomiting while hanging in a climbing rig is no fun.
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For every legit towing story, there’s one of these…
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GTOger (the tow truck channel), DOES showcase the people who heed the warnings. Several of their videos feature people who pull in, read the warning signs, and then pull back out – usually tagged with a a large #ReadingComprehension graphic on the screen.
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And so, cruising around to avoid parking will be outlawed.
And so, self-driving cars will find a spot every 5-10 minutes and park for a minute.
And so the arms race continues.
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The tow truck pirates in that article are horrible! I had no idea that sort of thing happened. Scoundrels everywhere.
In cases where tow away zones aren’t clearly marked, I agree with you, too. The owner of the lot should be on the hook for the towing fees, but even if the car owner wins that fight it’s a bunch of b.s. that they had to go through the trouble to begin with.
If you go down to Deep Ellum, put your money in your pants.
Tow truck drivers in Deep Ellum, they don’t give a car a chance.
Oh, sweet mama, daddy’s got them Deep Ellum blues.
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Also, it’s probably unreasonable to expect 11foot8 to somehow showcase those who avoided accidents. It seems to be a guy with a few cameras and once or twice a month there’s a spectacular crash. That’s easy to film. How do you identify which vehicles might have gone through and turned instead, or actually took an entirely different route? How is he supposed to showcase that? Why would anyone even care? You could just watch a live stream of the site and say that every truck that turned away at that corner is a showcase of success, but to what point?
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The ghost car set to after-dark cable channel elevator jazz at the end was the piece de resistance.
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Obligs…
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From the FAQ under every video:
Q: How come you never post videos of cars that belong there?
A: Because that wouldn’t be entertaining at all. It would be completely boring.
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Bingo. There are plenty of DART Park and Ride spots available. It’s a bar district anyway. Take public transport, avoid the hassle, and get your buzz on.
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You know, instead of going all “the sky is falling”, coming up with a working solution to the problem is fairly easy… just have Autonomous parking lots, and a legal mandate that unoccupied vehicles must either be enroute to destination or parked in such a lot.
Honestly, it will be nice when I go to the mall to have my car drop me off at the door, and it can find a spot. It would be very nice if the parking lot was smart enough to tell my car where to find a spot, but in the meantime, having an autonomous car prowling the parking lots looking for a spot is no worse than having me do it…
The fun thing is going to be coming up with a standard way of letting Auto-cars know if they can park in a spot or not…
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The top floor of the parking garage across from the Cook County Jail is known for its striptease and semaphore performances!
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The Other Kind of Life by Shamus Young describes a system like this (alongside a bunch of other near-future or alternate-future tech) it’s an interesting book for the worldbuilding he’s done.
