I don't know why you'd ascribe it to incompetence. Why is it incompetent to disallow parking, e.g. during rush hour but not during other hours? Or to disallow parking during street sweeping hours? Or to accommodate truck loading/unloading hours for adjacent retail, or bus loading/unloading hours for nearby schools? Parking rules are just time-domain multiplexing of conflicting uses of parking lanes.
Some of the complaints here are classic "lazy programmer" reaction to unavoidable complexity--make the solution easier by solving a different problem. Sometime's that's the right approach, but someone isn't incompetent for choosing a more complex solution that solves a problem more precisely.
I don't really like this tendency of people on HN to convict based purely on motive. The limitations of that approach showed up hilariously in the article about why New York City's subway offers $9, $19, and $39 cards.[1] Everyone jumped to the "dark pattern" of the city wanting to create unusable remaining balances, while ignoring the obvious fact that the numbers were clearly chosen to minimize the amount of change that would have to be made by the machines given the $1 new card fee and people paying in $10's and $20's.
Well consider Ferguson, the city with such out of control fines/fees that there are more warrants for the arrest of citizens who owe fees for minor infractions than there are citizens!
Historically governments have had such asymmetric power over individuals that we take for granted that signs are beyond reproach. What is so inspiring about this designer's work is that it is so refreshingly democratic.
Not to defend the abhorrent practice of taxation via police action--
A lot of municipalities are also being screwed pretty hard by state-level policies. Many states cap how much a municipality can raise through "legitimate" taxation (eg, property, sales and income taxes) while imposing mandates on what services the municipalities must provide. Meanwhile, municipalities have an even worse time taking on debt than the state government. So it's not too uncommon for a municipality to end up in the position of being unable to meet its obligations, having nothing left to cut, and no authority to raise taxes.
Municipalities aren't a monolith. Some of the trickier restrictions where I live are the result of lobbying from neighbors who wanted to restrict parking to just residents during the day. They don't get any money from the fines.
Sure they can. There was an article right here on HN about how some tool forgot to read the parking signs, got a ticket, and had it dismissed over some close reading of the sign code, thereby becoming a living libertarian hero.
Parent said he signs are malicious, not be rules. The signs are he programmer laziness, not being arsed to solve he problem, just piling on special cases and overloading the framework.
Some of the complaints here are classic "lazy programmer" reaction to unavoidable complexity--make the solution easier by solving a different problem. Sometime's that's the right approach, but someone isn't incompetent for choosing a more complex solution that solves a problem more precisely.