Maybe I'm alone, but I feel like this makes sense. It would be difficult, and take more effort than its worth, to have to decide which hydrants are legal to park in front of, somehow designate them so drivers know they're inactive when looking for parking spots, and instruct police and parking enforcers on which hydrants they're allowed to ticket for.
Or they could do like the do in the UK, and have the hydrants in manholes in the middle of the road or pavement, so they can't be blocked by cars and won't freeze or get damaged. The fire engines carry the above ground hydrant part with them and attach them when they use them. But then that wouldn't generate any revenue.
The Fire Department already has to keep track of which hydrants are operational.
If marking them would generate any revenue it would be done very quickly. As it is not marking them generates tons of parking ticket revenue, so that's what's done.
Only issue with this is probably the city would have to hire somebody to paint it, so they have to decide on a budget, have a bidding process, comply with union requirements, and then finally execute it.
The covering of them mentioned by nommm-nommm might actually work, though.
Maybe remove or fix the non-functional hydrants? It seems to me that firefighters wasting time trying to use one in an emergency could have far more serious consequences than just some parking tickets.
