My freedom of speech is being violated here..who thought of this and why? So what if I want to sell my car..
If the OP could think coherently, he would assume that this is a pre-emptive strike against abandoned cars being dumped in the lot.
CSSHEGEWISCHIf the OP could think coherently, he would assume that this is a pre-emptive strike against abandoned cars being dumped in the lot.
He IS thinking coherently -- that's his home they're talking about.
I think it is much less a strike against 'abandoned cars' than it is about freeloaders advertising their cars in commuter-needed parking spaces on a daily, ongoing basis. It would be a grand place to park a peddled car ... or two ... or sixteen ... off the street and where a large number of commuter eyeballs will be paraded past, twice a day. But every one of those 'used-car lot' slots is one that a harried commuter can't use to catch a train... and one that Metrolink has paid for construction and maintenance of -- and they probably assume some liability for vehicles parked there 'no matter what'.
I confess if I worked for Metrolink I'd already be setting up arrangements with a tow company and spotters like that McDonald's in Detroit...
There is something that's been bugging me for some time. Why do people feel entitled to "free" parking? How would they feel about paying for parking and riding free on transit or commuter rail? As it is, the people who use the transportation service who did not use their cars to get there are paying for the expenses involved in maintaining the "free" parking.
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"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Something I recall 'going by' at New Jersey Transit many years ago was the idea of prominently-dated 'voucher' stubs on tickets: you would put the voucher on your dashboard, like a parking pass, to confirm you were 'riding' that day and were therefore entitled to a rider's slot. Commuters with dated multiple-ride discounts would get some corresponding slip they could display.
In those days scanning readers with online (we called it 'distributed' back then) connectivity were pretty much science fiction, so the idea of correlating the number of multiple-ride coupons with dates of use (for example, both ticket and stub would be machine-readable coded, and the ticket infrastructure would have recorded that the corresponding ticket had been 'validated') was more difficult to assure.
Instructively perhaps, the scheme foundered on the idea of making ticket purchasers go back to their cars, unlock them, put the stub where it would be visible, etc., perhaps while the train is coming into the station, and then hope that no weasel breaks out their glass or uses a hanger to pop their lock to steal the stub for free parking.
DART uses an interesting variant at its 'outer stations': there are two classes of parking, restricted and unrestricted, and you have to have special credentials to be able to park legally in the restricted reserved spaces (which are closer to the boarding point). This simplifies enforcement, as the 'credentials' can be clearly visible from a cruising vehicle without having to get out, and secondary means of detecting 'fakes' is easily provided.
One other option would be providing license plate numbers when buying the ticket, with the option of provding multiple #'s for a monthly pass where the ticket holder may have the primary car in the shop.
Erik_MagOne other option would be providing license plate numbers when buying the ticket, with the option of provding multiple #'s for a monthly pass where the ticket holder may have the primary car in the shop.
A very similar arrangement is currently used for E-Z Pass registration in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and it would be comparatively simple to keep the 'one' transponder in whatever vehicle is in use (again as E-Z Pass currently does it) when others are in the shop. There is a special 'page' for registering-in rental cars on the fly, which could without too much actual technical difficulty be cross-referenced to actual rental record metadata, dealer or garage 'loaners', etc.
The logical extension of 'online plate registration' to transponderless optically-based tolling systems (I believe the George Bush Memorial toll road around Dallas uses one) would work nicely for 'registered' license plates. There are modern machine-vision systems and OCR that can capture plate data in even a quick drive-through in bad weather, and analyze it on the fly to flag problems and indicate where cars for 'follow'up' are located.
One potential problem is what happens when multiple registered plates show up in the same parking lot. Or people start stealing plates or swapping them while parked. Or people flood the system with plate numbers added and dropped for friends' convenience -- establishing a hard limit on either the number of plates registered or the number of 'swaps' permitted in a given time period only partially redresses the potential issues.
As for why commuter/light rail have free parking-- is that the Federal Transit Adminatration guidlines for its "New Start" Program is that under the CFR the New Transit Rail or New Bus Rapid transit has to atract a at least 60% virgin or new riders and not be poaching riders from existing bus routes.-- This means people who would normaly drive to work which in reality means white middle class suberban commuters. This was a brought under scrunity by the NAACP when the Minnie-St Paul line tried to not build inbetween stations in Black/Hispanic Neighborhoods. The funding problem created by the Bush II Adminstartion also is creates a problem where over crowded bus lines in lower income neighborhoods can not be upgraded to light rail and at best BRT is a band-aid option. (for citaions please PM me). Even if these people had cars they could not afford the outragious parking monthy passes that are required and still make rent/groceries for there housing.
In Chicago suburbs, most/all parking lots for Metra charge a fee.
Overmod One potential problem is what happens when multiple registered plates show up in the same parking lot.
One potential problem is what happens when multiple registered plates show up in the same parking lot.
My thought was that only one of the "multiple registered plates" would be allowed in the parking lot at a given time. We could also go a step further tie the onboard scanning of the ticket as proof the driver was using the train.
The shopping mall that's at the north end of the trolley line through UCSD has license plate readers at the entrance and exits. Parking is free for two hours, and the exit gates will open automatically for cars exiting with the free parking time.
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