Shit happens; signs are confusing, drivers make mistakes, cops make mistakes. And that may be a once in a lifetime event for a regular driver, but when you have thousands of drivers parking dozens of times a day, "once in a lifetime" becomes "once a week".
Except very special and rare situations, the driver should be personally liable for a ticket even if on the job. Traffic laws apply to individual drivers and not vehicle owners or contractors.
I have a friend who works as a driver (merchandising, not delivery) and he personally pays for his parking tickets. This is in the UK though, maybe things are different in the US.
My brother-in-law lives in LA, and parks there every day. He honestly tries not to get parking tickets, but he's been towed once or twice because the street wasn't clear. I know he isn't intentionally trying to break the law. I also got a parking ticket when visiting once. I very carefully looked at the signs, there were 2 other cars on that side of the street. I parked there, and went into visit thinking I was fine. I got back to a parking ticket, and looked at the sign again, and had Monday/Tuesday mixed up. I didn't intend to break the law. It is accidental.
Last I looked up, the city of LA makes somewhere around 200 million a year on parking fines alone. There's tons of places in LA where it appears safe to park, but then you come back to find a ticket on your windshield because there's a sign way off in the distance and obscured by a tree. Parking enforcement "officers" are specifically told to never make exceptions, and their little ticket machines are designed so that, once your license plate is entered, the action can't be undone and they are forced to complete the ticket in order to continue doing their job.
In a crowded urban neighborhood, there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop. Unless the delivery company refuses to service the area, it’s going to do some double parking.
Downtowns address this problem with yellow commercial loading zones but those don’t really exist in residential neighborhoods.
Ye. Service vehicles usually are exempted from the actual parking rules in practice. A sewage utility vehicle wont get ticketed if it has a pipe going down a adjacent drain and has the wheels on the sidewalk etc.
Walking from a free parking spot to the delivery location is not included in the price. Unless all delivery companies are forced to follow the parking laws (for real) at the same time they will just go out of business.
The problem is that the end user don't know what quality of delivery they will get, so they choose the cheapest, and there is a race to the bottom, like flight tickets.
When comparing prices the end user doesn't know that they might be beaten off the plane by security to make room for a business class late arrival end user, so the risk is not priced in correctly ...
Then, the delivery trucks shouldn't be parking there. Clear a spot and turn it into commercial parking only, i say. They're doing this right now on Polk street and it's so much safer for bicyclists on the portions that have this now.
A short detour on a sidewalk or grass/dirt shoulder doesn't seem that dangerous to me. Does it happen much that there's no room on the right and the cyclist has to go around the left of the truck?
There's a couple reasons that this dangerous enough that converting some street parking to commercial load/unload is a better solution:
1. There's no quick conversion in the middle of the street. It's a curb, which would require hopping, which is nearly impossible for an ebike and a dangerously unstable maneuver anyway.
2. There are cars blocking visibility with the sidewalk. If you hop onto it, you might strike a pedestrian you didn't see. Perhaps a short one, such as a child, who are unpredictable anyway.
3. Going to the right of the truck is a great way to get doored in the 0" of clearance between the truck and other parked cars. If it's the truck, enjoy your guaranteed head injury from the truck door 3 feet off the ground.
4. Biking on the sidewalk is illegal in many cities. So is parking in the bike lane, for that matter. Expecting one party to break the law because of a failure to enforce a separate law is unreasonable.
Yes. Why not? Add more busses and trams. Sunset houses have garages, many driveways, much of which is stuffed with junk and undriven cars. Perhaps they are supersaturated with cars?
The "no cars in the city" philosophy is not one without challenges or setbacks - getting rid of parking in sunset would suck, but it would motivate the creation of more and better public transit, which is a better solution than cars by nearly all marks.
So start having internet retailers and takeout restaurants say “we don’t serve your street because it has a bike lane” and see how the long the bike lane lasts.
> there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop
So they shouldn’t stop there then. Deliver the last mile on foot or using a cart. If it’s too large for that I guess you can get some kind of permit like they do for construction.
If you park millions of trucks perfectly legally across the country, you will almost certainly get erroneous tickets. Traffic wardens are not infallible - that's why we have traffic court.
Mistakes happen. My grandparents got one because the sign was a good 50m away (a long way for a disabled driver) and looked like it was referring to another part of the road, and my mother got one when she stopped for 20s to pick me up from somewhere (yes there was a sign, but she hadn't even been stopped long enough to read it).
Parking violations usually don't require proof of intent. So unless you believe people never make mistakes and are always fully knowledgeable about parking rules, then tickets are sometimes random (or at least capricious) and accidental.
The GP was talking about a delivery company budgeting for tickets. All the answers to the parent miss the point. The discussion is on a large scale with a significant amount of tickets. If it's a hundred tickets for 1,000 drivers a year, that's a few thousand bucks for a multi-million dollar salary. Doesn't something like that run under miscellaneous and isn't explicitly budgeted for?
If they don't budget it, then is shows that they don't care about parking tickets at all, they just pay whatever. Budgeting it shows they are tracking tickets which is a necessary component of reducing ticket counts.
Rhetoric is fun; it's easy to prove both a proposition and its opposite.
You should watch a few episodes of caught in providence on youtube. Shows how traffic tickets can be given out wrongly or some laws are simply too hard to follow.
I used to work for a delivery company on the software side. Our drivers were responsible for paying their own tickets, and there’d still be one or two a month.
Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. They aren’t random or accidental.