I’m not trying to call out the people who run these channels for some kind of moral censure. My point is that I don’t think watching them is good for me. It might not be good for anyone else, either.
The city is built to demand more parking resources than it has, apparently: systemic. This is true about a lot of cities, though: genuinely difficult. City planning and the parking policies that go with it are big subjects, full of standard practices that exist for political / economic reasons rather than for quality-of-outcome reasons. It’s a thorny mess.
I have no doubt that some people are lazy, or cheap, or entitled about where they leave their car. But videos like this don’t actually demonstrate what the people in them are like. Instead they leave a path open for the viewer to assume those qualities.
Again: I don’t think the video makers are the devil and I don’t think the illegal parkers should be absolved of all blame. But I think the thought processes that the videos trigger in me (maybe in you too), the viewer, are not constructive ones.
I’m not going to watch anymore, and this is why. Other people will of course choose differently.
Of course these people have no grounds to complain about being towed, and the guy is within his rights to call the tow truck. That doesn’t mean he’s not the world’s most obvious asshole. His channel might as well be called “I get a boner from making other people unhappy”.
A nice person would have just spent a fraction of that camera budget on physical parking barriers – like, you know, a chain – so that no one ever had to get towed again.
Putting up barriers is expensive. Managing barriers so customers and deliveries can use the lot is expensive. Putting up signs and having people who put their cars on your property towed is free and it works fine.
I guess that’s kind of the point- autonomous vehicles as currently proposed will cause additional road traffic, increase congestion and make dense urban areas worse.
Here’s a study from last summer:
Without public policy intervention, the likelihood is that the autonomous future mirrors today’s reality: more automobility, more traffic, less transit, and less equity and environmental sustainability.
GToger doesn’t get kickbacks from the towing company. He gets a parking lot for his customers. This is actually the parking lot for a data center, and the farthest “parking spot” that people keep parking in is actually a loading dock. Customers could come in any time of day or night because their servers let out the magic smoke, and in fact many of his customers prefer to come late at night so that any outage is at a time when people aren’t trying to use their web site, so he has to keep the loading dock and at least a couple of parking spots open 24/7. So whoever is on duty as security at the data center keeps an eye on the parking lot cameras, and keeps the tow company on speed dial. Oh – he posted a photo of the parking lot once. I spotted at least ten no-parking signs complete with tow truck image and the phone number to call if you’re towed, all of which emphasized 24/7 towing of anybody who was not a customer of the data center. Anybody who parks there deserves to be towed.
