>>>Over here the car would be marked on first round, checked again after max time expires and get a ticket even if the meter was filled up again without moving the car. No sweat for Gov over here - only loosing out on the chance to drag it through court ;-)
>>
>>Here, cars haven't been "marked" (e.g. chalk on tire) for a long time - people just wipe it off. We have camera cars instead, which causes problems of their own with the letter of how laws are written: http://www.nsnews.com/news/West+Vancouver+backs+down+tickets/7977388/story.html
>
>ok, you win. You are saddled with even more stooopid rules ;-)

What we have in effect is pay by SMS. There are no parking meters, no attendants, just a sign saying which number to call for this area. It's usually a four digit number starting with a 9 (and the old emergency numbers which used to start with a 9, like 92 for police, 93 for fire, 94 for ambulance and 95 for exact time - yes, that one still works - are now beginning with a 19). You send an SMS with just your tag number and you're covered for as many minutes the sign says. You get a message back when your parking is about to expire and then you can send another message to extend it. This works in pretty much any city I've been to so far, and it was in effect in Belgrade and few other larger cities for about ten years now.

There's a guy watching the monitors in one of the buildings nearby, and he just keeps checking the tags against the database. If your number is not in there with a current payment, he pings the guy on the street who walks to your car and sticks a note (which is about 3€, while the price of parking is about 0,25€). Now the kicker is that the character set used in the tags includes all english and all serbian-specific characters (i.e. šćđšč), while the software in the database did not include these five when new tags were introduced two years ago, and also many people don't even know how to have these characters on their phones. Now the probability that you'll have one of those on your tags is about 30%, and I can imagine the amount of trouble this caused. My tags are in the 70% so I don't know how and whether this was resolved.

Another fine point is that these parking places are on city land, the enforcement (i.e. you go to misdemeanor court if you don't pay) is by the state, but the parking money goes, in some cities, to a private company.