Fuck you, ultra-modern parking meter

The BBQ Pit
1

My home city, in all of its wisdom, recently replaced the old-fashioned individual parking meters with a new, “better” system.

The old meters worked like this:
-Park your car, get out.

-If you’re lucky, there’s still time remaining on the meter from the previous occupant.

-If not, or if you need more time, you put coins in meter until the amount of time displayed on the meter will be enough. Then you go about your business.
The new system works like this:
-Park your car, get out.

-The post by your spot has a unique 4-digit number on it; make a mental note of that number.

-Walk thirty yards to a fancy computerized box, where you punch in that number. You did remember that number, didn’t you? Fuck. Run back and check one more time.

-Insert coins (or a credit card) into the magic box to buy parking time for your spot.

-How do you know whether you have purchased enough time? Well, you poor bastard, hope you’re good at math. The display on the magic box tells you how much money you’ve put in so far, and what time of day your parking space will expire; you add more money to push this expiration time farther into the future. If you want to know how much time you have (as in number of minutes, not time of day, e.g. “35 minutes should be enough for lunch”), you need to either know the current time (which the magic box does NOT tell you), or you need to calculate the number of minutes based on how much money you’ve put in and what the parking rate is (“let’s see, 45 cents at $1.20 per hour is…fuck, anyone got a calculator?”).

-You can get a printed receipt for your records, but of course once you leave, the next guy who parks in your spot has no idea whether there’s time left on that spot or not; he has no choice but to pay the meter, even if you’ve bought it for the rest of the afternoon.

I’m sure the city loves it, because the poor beleaguered city employee who collects meter money now has to empty just one big box instead of 20 individual parking meters - and even that box doesn’t fill up as often, since a good many people use a credit card instead of coins. But of course every goddam driver has to spend two minutes figuring out this fucking computer and calculating how much time they just bought, all while you (and probably a couple of other drivers) stand in line waiting for your turn to do the same calculus for your own car. And nope, no free parking for anyone, ever again.

So fuck you, ultra-modern parking meter. You may be saving the city a few bucks’ worth of tax dollars every day, but you’re pissing off the citizenry and wasting cumulative hours of peoples’ lives every goddam day.

2

I was relatedly pissed when a neighboring shore town put in new electronic meters with sensors that register when a car leaves and automatically reset themselves. No more getting that 45 minutes the last guy left behind. Fuckers.

3

The “no free parking” thing is a drag for sure, it’s pretty sweet to find a parking meter that has time left on it.

However, I think I’m personally more likely to want to know “what time does the meter expire?” rather than “in how many minutes does the meter expire?”. I guess it would be nice if it would display both though.

4

So you don’t have to drive around with a car full of quarters, but instead can use a debit card?

Bunch of fuckers indeed.

5

Clearly it’s time for a modernized remake of Cool Hand Luke

“Nobody can eat fifty eggs.”

Stranger

6

Nice rant. Just to nit-pick, your city may have nothing to do with the new system. Many cities are selling their parking meter systems to private companies. These agreements often obligate the company to upgrade the meters (and of course incentivize them to upgrade to the type that don’t allow parkers to use time left-over by others).

7

Ours is a little different in that the space doesn’t have a code, but the printed receipt needs to be visible on your dashboard, so if there’s “extra time”, you’re driving away with the evidence and it can’t benefit anyone else.

The one good thing is that since this system applies to everywhere in the city, I can put a lot more money on it at the beginning and then park in two or three different places while doing errands across town, and only have to go to the machine once.

8

What drives me nuts on the computerized parking meters is that there’s still 2-hour time limits on them. If you need to stay somewhere for 3 hours, you can’t choose to add enough money for 3; and since you have to display a receipt with your expiration time in your windshield, you can’t come back after an hour and add another quarter, either, as that only adds an hour to the current time, not to your expiration time. So if you’re at a three hour event, you can’t just nip out and feed the meter whenever you have a break – you have to do it exactly when the meter runs out, whether you have a break or not.

9

What happens if you purchase more time for yourself before your time has expired? Does it extend the expiration time or does it reset the expiration?

10

There are two grocery stores I frequent, and they both “upgraded” their credit card readers recently. On one, the display is so hard to read, I can’t navigate it w/o my reading glasses. And there are several screens you have to go thru to press “accept”, and they keep switching which side (right vs left) the “accept” button is on. At the other, they installed a key pad (used to be on the display) which is tiny and placed below the screen, shrouded by some overhang thing that I have fight it to get the numbers punched in.

Who designs these pieces of crap???

11

Good argument against “privatization”.

12

People that couldn’t cut it writing printer drivers, usually.

13

I ran into this yesterday. On the whole, I approve of parking meters that will let you insert a debit card rather than have to collect a whole slew of quarters. But the thing has a screen that’s very hard to read in the sun.

Note to city: Denver claims it is one of the country’s sunniest cities, and it is.

So…I couldn’t read the display in the sun. When I shaded it with my notebook, I realized the letters were too small to read (for me) without my reading glasses. But in order to put my reading glasses on I had to take my sunglasses off, and the bright sun made me so squinty I STILL couldn’t read it.

I was trying for 2 hours. What I got was 1 hour 24 minutes. Fortunately, that was enough.

But, sheesh, I am surely not the only person in town who’s going to have trouble reading that kind of screen in the sunlight.

14

Wait, wait, WAIT. They expect you to either wear a watch (AND know how to read it) or be able to do third grade level math in your head??

Why don’t they just require a Doctorate in parking while they’re at it? This is an outrage.

15

The places where I park, they say it’s 2-hour parking, and that’s it. You cannot feed the meter. After two hours you have to move your car to another parking spot. Really. If you put more money in the meter, you’ll still get a ticket.

I think the idea was to free up the parking every so often.

16

There was at least a decent tradeoff with the old system.

You always had to put in more money than you might need, in order to avoid the risk of getting a parking ticket. (Or you might get a parking ticket.) But OTOH, you might be able to catch the last 25 minutes that the last guy in that space didn’t use.

These ‘modern’ meters break that implicit bargain, and that’s what I find bothersome about them. If you’re not ever going to get a free ride on the time someone else didn’t use, the least they ought to do is enable you to pay for exactly the time you use.

If they’re going to have a centralized box, rather than paying at individual meters, it seems the logistics would be simple enough: swipe a credit or debit card when you park, then swipe it again as you’re leaving, and get charged for the time in between.

Having to play guessing games about how much time you’re going to need, and risking a parking ticket if you guess wrong by too much in one direction, is really pretty silly when you think about it. It’s just that up until the past 15 years or so, there was no better alternative. Now there’s no reason why there can’t be.

17

Seattle & Portland have the same kind now–pay at a nearby pedastal (one or two per block) and get a sticker that lets you park anywhere. Nice.

Except that the reliability of the connection to validate your debit card sucks. Try card, fail. Try other card. Fail. Try third card, fail. Try first card again. Works! Stupid machine.

18

Maybe they should just charge more for parking.

It shouldn’t be that hard to set a parking rate where the vast majority of spaces are filled all the time (to benefit the city or the vendor the most) but where there are almost always a few open spaces (so that people patronizing local businesses can generally find a space when they need one). This might involve setting different rates for different times of day, and different for weekdays v. weekends/holidays, but again, this shouldn’t be that tough anymore.

19

Lived in a place with a similar system, except you called with a cellphone and gave the parking spot number, and you could call back at any time to top it up.

This, in theory, should have worked. But since there was no mechanical method displaying the time left (these parking meters also had the usual insert change turn dial) I’m guessing tickets were just automatically dispensed by the parking people without them checking. Theoretically you’d be able to contest the ticket by getting proof of your call, but that just became too much hassle and everyone just stuck to change.

20

They introduced these types of meters in parts of Baltimore when i lived there.

If i was leaving about to leave a parking spot, and another car was waiting for me to pull out, i would go up to the driver and hand him or her the receipt if there was time left. If there was no-one waiting, and i still had time on the receipt, i would fold it in half and stick it into the slot in the machine, so the next person couldn’t miss it.