I get where you're coming from. Police departments enforcing the rules not to better the community they serve but to bring in money to pay their salaries. It pisses me off too. The thing is, free parking fucks up cities[0][1]. It makes driving seem like a better idea than it is. It encourages sprawl. We need ways for people to pay for the space their cars occupy, and that means we need ways to punish people who take that space and don't pay. And, yeah, that means we need parking tickets.
I only partially agree with that. There are plenty of more liberal ways to enforce parking payments and rules following. However, cities choose to take advantage of the situation and abuse the system.
For example, SFMTA could easily charge half of what they do for towing and people would still park illegally ONLY when they misunderstood something or lost track of time.
Don't even get me started on meters. Why do chosen people pay $75 for a minute overtime and not all pay for what they overtimed instead? (hint: more money to the city)
At any case, we all know that the system is abused and it has to change at some point. When? That depends on how long all of us are going to let this slide.
Yeah, you're not wrong. In particular, the fact that the SFMTA isn't cooperating with the part of the program that's just supposed to make paying the tickets easier is kind of damning. I'd like to think that better technology could make enforcement cheaper, more consistent, and thus drive down penalties, but there are enough rent-seeking bastards involved to give me pause there.
[0] http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf
[1] http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...