So they're saying that a resident permit that doesn't have to worry about street cleaning is only $50/mo!

I think a huge number of people are just going to pay the ticket. There are certainly low-income people who live in Cambridge and people who live with a few roommates, but there's also a lot of people easily affording $3,000+ in rent. $50/mo to not have to deal with street cleaning will likely get a lot of people not moving their cars.

I think that's why the pilot will likely fail or at least need to be adjusted. If the ticket were $200, it would make a lot more people move their car. At $50, it's way cheaper than paying for off-street parking.

Maybe the alternative would be to do street cleaning twice a month like Somerville does. That way you'd get the places a car didn't move the first time on the second go-around. It would also mean $100/mo in fines instead of just $50.

At $50, it just seems like a lot of people would pay it and ignore it. I am glad that Cambridge is moving away from towing because that was always terrible. I just think that a $50 ticket is going to be meaningless to half of Cambridge. Median income in Cambridge is $113,000. Of the population that owns cars, the median income is going to be a lot higher. Towing was always way too harsh a solution to the problem, but $50 probably won't move the needle enough.

Thinking about it some more, maybe the solution is towing a car on the third ticket. We've ticketed your car twice for not moving for street cleaning and you don't care about the $50 so we're going to tow. I think that makes a lot of sense. Towing someone for a mistake is way too harsh. However, letting some rich person pay way less than off-street parking costs to ignore street cleaning seems too lenient and problematic for street cleaning. This way, the city just tickets for infractions that might be honest mistakes, but also deals with habitual violators to make sure that people understand this isn't a $50/mo way to buy yourself out of street cleaning.