In downtown Calgary - as in Toronto, and no doubt other cities - they have replaced meters with machines that you pump money into to be given a chit to put on your dashboard. In Toronto, people would give chits with remaining time on them to others, or leave them in obvious spots - the evil geniuses of parking-machine manufactury have defeated such attempts at neighbourliness by creating machines that require you to input your license plate number, which is printed on the chit. So now the municipality can not only make money off both people who overestimate and underestimate the amount of time they will need, but they can also, in contravention of elementary business ethics, charge twice for the same product. In other words, if I pay for the use of a parking space for an hour but only use it for five minutes, the municipality thinks nothing of renting it to someone else for the remaining fifty-five minutes that I have already paid for, and in fact has made it impossible for me to allow someone else to use the space that I have paid for. If your landlord rented out your apartment while you went away for the weekend, the judge would rightly throw the book at him ....