is there a strategy / parking authority

Cop rides through at 8 AM and places a mark on a tire, on every car on that block. The placement is unimportant. Sign says, "2 Hour Parking, Weekdays, 7AM-5PM".

At 10:15 he rides back through and every car there that has a chalk mark, gets a parking ticket.

The car(s) you saw with multiple marks have been tagged at different times at other places. Because the officer has a long stick with the chalk in the end, the mark iy typically place near the bottom, because the officer doesn't stop, he swipes the tire as he passes.

In Manitou Springs CO they use the license plate readers on the cop cars to enforce parking. I don't know if they write tickets on the spot or use snail mail.

In Boulder CO non-residents get 2 (or 3?) hours ONCE a day. I don't know how they enforce that.

I have seen a motorcycle traffic enforcement officer in the downtown area of Highland Park, Illinois, ride around with a four-foot stick making chalk marks at the junction between a tire of each vehicle and the street, yes. Probably about 15 years ago.

The downtown area of Highland Park, at that time anyway, allowed two hours of free street parking. But merchants depended on those parking spaces turning over. There was a train station with lots of commuter trains to Chicago nearby. And the merchants did not want people parking for free in front of their stores and then taking a train downtown and staying all day, blocking potential customers. Paid parking was available at the train station. So IMO, perfectly reasonable.

Once most days at varying times, police would do this, come back two hours later, and ticket any car that hadn't moved. If you moved your car up one space (as would be indicated by a chalk mark on your tire at 9 o'clock), no ticket and no problem.

I know for a fact in NYC, you can't add time. 2 hour limit means 2 hour limit.

Specifically, I've asked a Phila attendant in the old days when a receipt was placed on dash, can you get a new one before the old one expires. Person said absolutely you can feed the meter and you can use that receipt anywhere in the city, you can give it to someone else when there's still time.

Now, with license plates and zones of course that changes.

It could very well be the attendant is wrong and told me wrong.

What right does anyone have to put a mark on someone's vehicle anyway lol

yeah and I thought even in NYC, you could move the vehicle up one space and that's OK

NYC parking is a ritual. We spent 2 overnights at my wife's aunt's house in Brooklyn. Cars even double park on the wrong side, blocking driveways, waiting for spaces to open up on the restricted side. One may think it's anonymous, but no. Everyone knows one another, so when blocking a driveway, they either know the person doesn't need to get in/out, OR, that blocked driveway, knows the car of the person blocking and can call them on their cell. It seems like in < 60 sec? The entire restricted side of the street (it's for weekly cleaning) is all filled with cars. Because once it opens up, those cars can stay for a week.

but in my home town the way the system worked was that the enforcement of limited time parking where there were no meters depended upon the location of the chalk mark on the tire. An enforcement officer would drive through an area on a motorcycle, using chalk on a stick to mark a tire at about the 5 o'clock position.

Some time later (with the interval depending upon the time limit at that particular location) an enforcement office would come through and ticket cars with chalk marks in that position. If the chalk mark was at another position, the assumption was that the car had not been at that particular location at the time of the previous sweep through the area, and no ticket was given.

- Tom -

And if you block someones driveway and aren't there to move it, getting a ticket is the least of your worries.

like everyone knows one another because it's all over the place. Either they know the owner(s) are at work, or are reachable via cell. With the virus, oil prices, and wall street, I would say parking is the least of anybody's concern now.