In the seven years that followed her parking ticket, the woman was arrested twice. She spent six days in jail. By the end of 2014, she had wound up paying the court $550 but still owed $541. All for a parking ticket. Counterintuitively, this state of affairs is exacerbated by cheap or free parking, which creates the supply constraints that make it necessary to break the rules, and haphazard enforcement, which requires cities to impose big fines to have any deterrent effect at all. When meter systems are working well, enforcement revenue goes down, because people can always find a place to
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