#parking-enforcement

#parking-enforcement

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From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

We are driving to a compound in London where seized hire e-bikes are taken. In the back of the van, there are three. We are sitting in the front and you can hear their alarms bleeping incessantly behind us. The noise is loud and irritating. Giri Manepalli, who is a street enforcement officer, says sometimes when he finishes a shift, he can still hear the bleeping in his head.

Council will vote on a pair of ordinances - one that would make it illegal to leave a trailer that's not attached to a vehicle on a city street and another that would outlaw the practice of renting out an RV parked on the street. Under the vanlording ordinance, it would be illegal to rent out an RV as a living space, store an RV that you plan to lease on the street or charge someone for a street parking spot.

Croydon Council is owed more than 1.13 million in unpaid parking fines, with some drivers racking up hundreds of penalty charge notices (PCNs) without paying a penny. According to figures seen by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), there are 6,701 outstanding PCNs across the borough, totalling 1,134,197 in unpaid fines. The list of the top 50 worst offenders shows that several vehicles have each been issued more than 300 PCNs, with individual debts running into tens of thousands of pounds.

Kensington and Chelsea council says it has seized 1,000 badly parked rental e-bikes so far this year. The action comes in response to complaints from residents who report the bikes as trip hazards and highway obstructions. Once reported, council staff remove the bikes from the streets and place them in storage. To have the bikes released, the providers are paying a one-off seizure fee, plus a daily storage fee if the bikes are not collected within 14 days.

"So it's gonna be a longer effort," Maher said. "It's gonna involve bringing on the resources to actually paint all these curbs, and it will roll out as those curbs get painted. It's probably a multiple-year project."

"It's a rip off 'Find my Friends.' I was able to reverse engineer the SF parking ticket system so I could see close to real time where parking tickets were issued in the city. And I was making a map of where the actual parking cops were as they traverse the city and issue tickets. In theory, you could use that to avoid them and avoid a ticket," said Walz.

Riley Walz, the same app-maker behind Bop Spotter which uses Shazam to pick up passing tunes from a mystery location in the Mission District and LooksMapping, the restaurant "hotness" meter, has a pretty useful new app called Find My Parking Cops, which maps out the shift routes of every SF parking enforcement officer by the tickets they write, every day.

Georgopoulos described how the ticketing practices were targeted and unfair, revealing a systemic issue within the SFMTA and its treatment of neighborhoods with higher minority populations.