I was reminded of this when I read a “Shower thoughts” post about clocks.
Where I live, there usually is free parking outside of stores and malls, but limited to a short time, such as 15 minutes or a couple of hours. People have parking discs that they rotate to show when they arrived, and put the discs up visible behind their windshields in their cars.
I have an automatic parking timer displayed in my windshield, that shows the time when I parked rounded up to the nearest half/whole hour. It’s a ”set and forget” thing, which auto adjusts to daylight savings. However, it speeds up 1 - 2 minutes a week, which I didn’t see as it rounds up the time, but I found out after a few months.
Once after parking, I took a quick dash into the store, took maybe 5 minutes. When I got back I had received a fine for the equivalent of 80 € for ”parking for 23 hours in a 2 hour spot”. They apparently don’t have to wait five minutes to write out the ticket if the parking timer was so off.
I didn’t contest the ticket, I considered it a learning experience and a reminder to never blindly trust technology.
In France, maybe other places in Europe, some parking spots require you to have a “parking disc” as we call it, set to your time of arrival.
What stops people from lying about when they arrived?
Nothing really, but if you arrive at 2pm, set your disk to 3pm and the warden comes by at 2:30pm he’ll probably figure out what you’re up to.
That is probably what the warden assumed the op was actually doing, but the way they get you is if you have set it forward by 30mim say, but then the wardens clock.you within those 30min the time will be off by 23.30 hours
Sweden allows for half hours in setting the time rounded upwards, so if I arrive at 11:32, I can set the time to 12:00. But not to 12:30.
This varies from country to country though, some (France?) allow 15 minutes, some (Norway?) require the exact time.
If a parking enforcement person goes by at 9.45 and sees it set to, say 10.15, you have a problem.