I have never seen one of these things before I moved to Cork, but the street I live on is very narrow. It's basically one lane, but traffic can go in either direction. One side of the street is designated as a parking area, but at one end it's marked as a "Loading Zone, No Parking." That section happens to be right outside my living room window.
People always park in the loading zone, and are constantly being towed away. A normal tow-truck would never be able to get the cars out of there, so they have this truck with a crane on it which lifts the cars up and drops them onto the flat bed part of the truck. It's pretty awesome to watch, except that the cars sort of swing around while they're being lifted.
Since the road is so narrow, the truck stops roughly sixteen inches from my window, and I keep waiting for a car to come through the wall. It hasn't happened yet - but I think one of these guys is going to make a mistake someday and I'll have a sweet new coffee table shaped like the front end of a Ford Mondeo.
