I had a very pleasant experience with "Parking Enforcement" in a commercial district outside of Pittsburgh recently. I had either forgot to put money in the meter or it ran out. Got back to my car to find a ticket. The fine was only a dollar and I think it was voluntary. On the ticket was printed a note explaining that the business community really values people coming to visit and so doesn't want to annoy those people with high parking rates or ticket fines. It was the most pleasant parking ticket experience I could imagine.
What bizarre machinations of Moloch; "we decided to fine you, but then we decided to not fine you, so we had to settle on fining you as little as possible while still fining you because we have to fine you or there wouldn't be a reason for this sub-sub-department of us to exist."
The question is, does it significantly reduce the number of people overstaying on the parking spot? A good use of parking meters is to ensure shared access to a limited parking resource. You can't just park your car all day there. You have to keep going back every hour to fill the meter, which means that you will usually leave and let someone else park there for a while.
The amount of the fine is irrelevant. It's just an annoyance to ensure that you realise the need to share the resource. If it does that, then the smaller the fine, the better.
That could be the rationale, but I doubt it. Seems more likely they were trying to keep their target numbers up (they're not allowed to call them "quotas" anymore). An officer with low numbers gets passed up for promotion. A department with low numbers gets passed up for budget increases. Gotta keep writing tickets, or there isn't a reason to exist anymore...
I think it's more likely that the business community told the traffic police to piss off. This was a financially distressed community whose main street business district is trying to bounce back.
Just think about how many people over the years haven't decided that was a good place to clean out the trash from their cars after receiving such a nice ticket.
