Dummies. In my country there is magic spell: "it's only for three minutes", in Italy they use "park anywhere" magic button (emergency lights). Don't believe there is nothing like this in US.
Pfft. In NYC if you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy in NYPD, you can get a "courtesy card" you can present to an officer to get out of all sorts of shit https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-court... You can even buy them online.
In NYC, you just buddy up with a policeman, abuse official vehicles and or place a vest, placard, note, or something vaguely cop-like on your dashboard and you’re fine! You can also get a fake temporary New Jersey license plate if you’re feeling lucky, but the NYS police or bridge police may pull you over.
My favorites for the first type is a deputy fire chief from a Long Island volunteer department who works construction and just double parks the department SUV in front of the site.
My favorite was watching a moving van pull up in front of a hydrant, then put an empty moving box on top of the hydrant, and stack another couple on top to complete the illusion.
I think a lot of the people getting these tickets would happily pay them in order to get the better spot. Plus there's all that stuff about diplomats just parking wherever they want because they don't have to pay tickets but that might've been fixed.
I have a friend who travels to the local downtown area (not New York) semi-frequently. He did the math and it turned out to be cheaper to accept and pay the occasional parking ticket than to pay the parking meter every time. So he just doesn't feed the meter. Apparently he only gets a ticket once every few years on average.
I couldn't do it because getting slapped with a fine would cause an anxiety flare-up even when I knew the consequences beforehand. (And also I have worse luck than other people and can prove it with math!)
I tried this a bunch of years back, though across the river in Jersey City. I moved to a building that was an enclave of sorts that had zero street parking. You could of course pay for the garage to the tune of ~150 a month at the time. I had a motorcycle, and realized that I could park it across the street from my office building a few blocks away, and a ticket for street cleaning was $20. They would ticket me every other week, so $40/month in total. I guess someone got sick of my shenanigans despite me paying the tickets off promptly each time I received one, and one day my bike was taken to bike jail. Maybe some tickets blew off, but I think they were just done with me, and it cost me $500 to get it back. I sold the bike shortly after, I had acquired a serious girlfriend, and was using it for trips home and to the beach (both about 30 miles away), and there was no way I was going to make her sit on the back of a crotch rocket that long.
However, I did pull a similar stunt in lower Manhattan for awhile too, though I moved my bike on street cleaning days- though to another illegal spot by my office building- at that point I was living in Battery Park and my office was right off the west side highway in Tribeca, and I never had a single issue doing that.
In my experience in college where some diplomat's kid would illegally park his car almost every day, they will tow the car but the embassy will go pick it up and pay the fine so it didn't really matter to them.
