In urban areas the city could even work with local property owners to place video cameras that have enough angle to be able to have a constant view of all the cars that park. Could automate ticketing car owners who overstay.

*Not that I wish for this, but it's theoretically possible to implement.

incentivize this by passing 20% of the ticket price back to the property owner

How do we de-incentivize doing cop’s jobs for them on HN? This is a great idea with one problem: fuck the police.

Ban parking cars on public property. Then nobody needs to be tracking how long it's there for.

Fully agreed.

They're not exactly equivalent. Tire-chalking essentially proves that the vehicle didn't move (or that the driver was ridiculously unlucky in that the mark showed up at about the same location). The number/license plate merely shows that the same car is in the same parking spot, so the (legal, if arguably too "letter of the law") approach of vacating the space and parking there again is indistinguishable from overstaying the limit.

I believe most jurisdictions require you to leave a space for some time before the parking "resets"

How would they know that hadn't happened?

If you require vehicles to be gone from a certain street for 24 hours, say, before parking there again for a 2 hour spot, and you check it at 1 pm then later at 4 pm, you can conclude the vehicle wasn't gone for 24 hours.

I know, but that's a little slower, way more expensive, and fails if the battery runs out or the GPS can't connect, or the license plate is too dirty to read.

Obviously the chalk method isn't perfect either, but it's close.

That is how parking enforcement works here in the Netherlands. Someone just drives a camera-equipped car around and everything happens automatically - you enter your license plate on the meter so times are known to the minute.

There are parking meters in the US city I live in, where you enter your license plate and you don't have to fill an individual meter or display a tag on your dash.

If the license plate is too dirty to read, give them a ticket for that instead.

Penalty should be greater than for the parking infraction anyway, otherwise people would dirty their plates deliberately.

There are also a lot of advantages once you automate this via a camera. Now you can put cheap cameras near spots and/or mount the cameras on cars to automate ticketing as police are driving around on other business.

My city does this (Florianopolis, Brazil). I can use a smart phone app to start the clock or just let an officer pass by and tag my car. Chalking seems very... rudimentary.

I think Salt Lake City for one does enforce parking this way.

San Francisco already does. Hell, it might actually be built into the enforcement vehicle (the Interceptors!), but don’t quote me on that part.

Palo Alto does something like this.