The logical solution would be for cities to switch to photographs and even automated cameras, which in the end will probably be more invasive of privacy than a chalk mark on your tires.
The more logical solution, from the city's perspective, might be to just get rid of free-but-time-limited parking. Then parking meters could serve as both the enforcement mechanism and another revenue source.
The article is inconclusive on this point, but many cities have paid and time-limited parking. The same issue applies whether parking is free or paid.
In some jurisdictions, the law states that you may not park in the same spot longer than a specified interval without moving your car.
In order to determine whether a car has moved between successive passes of Parking Enforcement, chalk (or another method) is used to determine whether the car has moved.
I have seen some cities that further prohibit parking anywhere on the same block after the time limit has expired; this eliminates have to determine whether the car has moved since you can't simply drive around the block and back to your initial space.
If they tried to do that then they'd have a massive protest by traffic enforcement people. They don't want that.
If you look at almost any seemingly wasteful/pointless/inefficient thing a local government does, you're pretty much guaranteed to find jobs behind it. The very slight relief of annoyance from what these things cause to the general public is not enough to overcome the extreme outrage that occurs when a group of people lose their jobs.
Why. Park, register with a meter. Your first 15 minutes are free, as they used to be. More time is paid time. Unregistered parking leads to an immediate ticket.
Those who did not abuse the system continue to park for free, and may expect more vacant spaces.
> And that search wasn't reasonable, the court said. The city searches vehicles "that are parked legally, without probable cause, or even so much as 'individualized suspicion of wrongdoing' — the touchstone of the reasonableness standard," the court wrote.
This is linchpin of the ruling. If a parked car is not suspected of wrongdoing, it could conceivably be argued that photographing it to establish wrongdoing is exactly the same as chalking it. IANAL
That's the heart of the matter, isn't it? How can chalking be a search when the fact that the car is parked there is in plain sight? If we regard "search" as a synonym of "google", then yes, we can say that the act of chalking allowed the police to acquire knowledge it didn't have before. I don't think the framers meant that though when they wrote the 4th Amendment. A search needs to involve something that's concealed.
"The logical solution would be for cities to switch to photographs and even automated cameras, which in the end will probably be more invasive of privacy than a chalk mark on your tires."
The logical solution is to chalkmark the asphalt next to the wheels. Line drawn perpendicular to center of each wheel ... "blue honda" written next to it.
The problem is that chalk is placed at a certain angle and falls off easily, which can indicate whether a car has moved or not. Photographs would largely only show that a car is in the same place it was in before, not whether it had left and come back in the meantime.
Funny how the legal system can work sometimes.