My friend and I, both from the NYC area where parking spaces are more valuable than Saudi Arabian mineral rights, recently took a road trip to parts south. In Charlotte, NC we encountered a parking lot system that befuddled us both.
Is was a street-level lot, like you would find, say, outside a supermarket. It appeared to be utterly unattended (at least when we were using it). Each parking space was numbered. Off to the side, near the sidewalk, was a big flat-front box where you were supposed to pay for your parking space. The box had many slots, each about 1.5" wide. The slots were numbered to correspond with the parking spaces. The instructions told us to fold up $5 in bills and push them through the slot that corresponded to our space.
And that was that. No meter. No receipt. No taking of our keys. Just walk away!
Now, I know it sounds so cliche that we jaded big-city guys would be so distrustful and suspicious, but we honestly stood around for about 5 minutes trying to figure out exactly how this system worked! I mean, what would prevent someone from simply parking and not paying? Like I said, there was no attendant on duty. The parking spaces and the slot box did not appear rigged to register our actions. And there did not seem to be any video camera monitoring the surroundings or the box (though, truth be told, we did not look too hard for Big Brother).
After all our befuddlement, we finally stuffed 5 bucks in the slot and walked away with clear consciences. But we’re still wondering: Is this parking lot (and presumably others in the U.S.) really just run on an honor system basis, with no enforcement mechanism to catch the scofflaws?
This. Paying an attendant at every single lot is much more expensive than paying one person to go around to 6 lots and check that money has been paid in the right places. You might be tricked by a few but that cost is still less than the expenses of five more workers.
They have this system to enter some county parks here. Failure to pay could lead to an absconding charge.
I also ran into this in Texas while parking my car so I could walk across the border into Nuevo Progreso, Mexico. There was a sign up that said, in effect, “God is watching you!” If god has to work as a parking attendant the economy must be worse than we thought.
The way a lot of “honor system” lots work is that on the rare occasion when they actually send someone out to check, non-payers get huge tickets and/or get their car impounded. The severity of the penalties are supposed to counteract the low likelihood of getting caught.
But, yes, also when they send someone around every few hours, or maybe every day, or maybe once a week, you just have no way of knowing…if they open the box and there isn’t at least $5 in the box for your car’s spot, you’ll get a ticket. Could there be $5 in there from the last person who parked there? Sure. If you’re lucky. Do you feel lucky?
Paranoia and self-doubt are perfectly cromulent time honored law enforcement techniques.
From my observations in NC, the attendants actually check pretty frequently, at least on days when there’s a lot of competition for parking spots. I assume they just wander between the different lots (and maybe check meters as well), so your chance of getting caught if you don’t pay isn’t trivial.
You could game the system by pulling into someones spot just as they were leaving. But that only works if you find someone just about to leave, and of course if that person didn’t pay, your screwed.
Those types of lots also often have a concrete-filled oil barrel that they’ll chain to cars that don’t pay. Don’t know how that works, but I’ve seen the barrel sitting there.
Here in Albuquerque, the self-pay lots downtown will boot your car if there’s not money in the slot. They will collect the fine, often around $100, from you directly, in cash, before they’ll unlock the boot. So the “honor system” you have to trust is not so much about whether the person parking is going to pay as it is whether the attendant and/or parking lot owner is going to be honest about who paid.
They have those at the Boston area commuter train stations. If you don’t pay, you will likely get a ticket, but it’s not a very expensive one, $20 I think. You just put it in the envelope they give you with the ticket and either put that in a drop box or mail it in. It’s a good thing its cheap, because putting the money in those things takes so long that if you’re late, you might just say screw it to avoid missing your train.
Some of the unattended lots in my city have replaced the honor boxes with a computerized exit gate. You have to swipe your credit card to exit. While this is marginally more expensive, I suspect it significantly increases the revenues generated.
All of these are pretty much the same for a regular parking meter:
nothing prevents you from parking at a meter and not putting money in.
sometimes you find a parking meter with time still on it from the last person.
if someone’s just pulling out from a meter, it’s even more likely that time is left on it.
The only real difference is that with a parking meter, it’s more obvious: either the time left is shown on the meter, or the red ‘expired’ flag is showing. But parking meters are still largely an honor system, backed up by the possibility of a fine if you get caught cheating.
And what is rather fair about it, is that the risk you take for parking and running a 15min errand is vanishingly small, but then again, who’d want to pay $5 for 15 minutes?
San Francisco used to have lots of those self-pay boxes until they were outlawed somewhere around five to ten years ago.
The homeless would fish money out of the boxes, and enough people raised a fuss after getting parking tickets that the city banned them and required parking lots to give receipts.
The answers above basically answer the question, but I will add that, at least in Charlotte, where I live, most of these lots are in areas which are used by long-term parkers, rather than people going in and out of a store for 15 minutes. The vast majority of parkers in these lots are commuters who are working downtown. That being the case, you don’t really need someone checking every hour. If the attendant checks once or twice a day, he is going to see the majority of parkers.
In most areas, if you are going to be less than two hours, there are other parking options that are cheaper, either meters (difficult to get, but not as difficult as a place like NYC), or standard multi-level lots where you pay by the hour (this not being NYC, the first hour is generally around $2, rather than $10).
Just as an aside: Many cities and lots are moving to a system where there is one kiosk at the lot or on the street at which one can use cash or credit card to pay. The kiosk shoots out a receipt that you put on your dashboard to show you paid.
