Recently I saw a Smart car parked side on in a bay and thought, what a great idea. Wouldn’t it be great if he gets to pay less for parking and large car owners get to pay more? Why not charge for parking by the linear foot\meter or whatever?
So the general idea is: you mark up the road with a series of stripes asay 50 cm apart. The user comes along and parks their car. Out they hop and count the stripes that the car covers. They then go to the meter and pay a sliding parking charge according to the covered stripes. Some courtesy rules would exist for example to leave two uncovered stripes between vehicles, but other than that the only thing the user needs to check is how many stripes they are covering.
The great thing about this idea is that it’s really easy to charge more for larger cars: the scale could be non linear to act as a deterrent to bring large cars into town. In general such a system would have a very cheap entry level for micro vehicles, curve to a plateau for average vehicles and rapidly rise for larger cars.
The relatively simple repeating nature of the pattern could be laid down by an automated machine rather then manually, and the lines need not use more resource (time or material). In fact measuring would be easier as the nature of the pattern is the regular repeating nature.
As should be obvious, the amount of vehicles which can be concurrently parked would vary with the mean size of the vehicles, but just an average should show that more cars could be parked.