I regularly parked in resident parking areas, getting tickets perhaps half the time, rather than the certainty of a higher price in a garage.
As an engineer, that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. (Resident parking violations are now much more expensive, so this loophole is largely fixed.)
But it was a bad thing to do, because you were taking parking spaces from the people they were for. Their fine structure was broken, but your moral calculus was the problem.
