The points I am struggling to make:
under the old system, I didn’t have to work it out. In this regard the new system is not an improvement, it’s a step backward.
the new system could be cheaply designed to display time remaining, but does not; the information display does not display as much information as it could/should.
Actually that’s pretty cool. What they should do is have the meter box ask for your cell number and then send you a text message 5 minutes or so before it expires (optional of course, but that would be easy to implement and pretty sweet).
Yeah, all sorts of knuckleheads in this thread. Above all, everyone seems to be forgetting that free parking isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be in the first place, regardless of what your town may have “always” done. Cite.
They charge on the second swipe. If you forget to swipe the second time the charge will be for the maximum time allowed (24 hour). thats how they work around here at least.
Wait…where is this fuck bus, and what exactly happens on board?
It’s the circuit trace on your motherboard that sends the porn from your network connection to your monitor.
Oh, that’s easy. I can spend 19/85ths of a day drinking in the bar and still have 1.2 x 10^14 picoseconds left to walk to the car.
Is a motherboard some sort of computer thingie? I post here via palantir.
Damn burning hands.
You don’t think that the city wants to give up dinging you with a $25 ticket for being three minutes late, do you?
They have this system here in Calgary as well, but at the same time them implemented a cellphone-based system - you can make an account with your cellphone and licence plate, then just call a number and type the 4 digit number to activate. When you’re done parking, call again and deactivate it and the system automatically charges you the proper amount for the time that you parked there. The system also emails/phones you if you’re running out of time (eg. parked in a 2 hour spot) in which case you can just call again to renew. You have to pre-pay to put money in your account and re-fill it periodically, but I have to admit it is quite convenient.
The on-the-street machines suck ass though.
Why do you need to know .65/1.20? It’s telling you what time it expires, right? It takes the math out of it and lets you know exactly when you have to move your car or buy more time. Why must you also know how much time you just paid for. I might agree that the current time could be useful, but it’s not necessary as I believe most people are going to be wearing a watch or have a cell phone with the time.
I see the “lazy goddam code monkeys” doing the users a favor with this method. If they had filled the unused display as you suggest, someone else would be on here bitching about “how goddamn hard it is to figure out what you’re looking at because of all the shit on the screen. They already tell you what time it expires, why do they need to tell you how much time that is?”
Honestly, I don’t see this as a bad thing.
Easy. Much like an automated parking garage that is thankfully in my past. At it, you owed for the number of full hours between check-in and check-out, rounded up. Ten minutes or 55 minutes, you paid for an hour. 65 minutes or 99 minutes, you paid for two hours (the first hour was somewhat higher cost than each additional hour, sort of a built-in 20-cent processing fee). And so on. And if you didn’t do the check-out, you owed the overnight rate, equivalent to eight times the single hour rate. One such charge, and you didn’t forget to check out again.
So when in doubt round up? That’s always a good system to avoid tickets, but for people for whom money is tighter have to be more exact. Why not just include the time it expires and the time left, and make everybody happy?
Assuming the city isn’t a bunch of crooks out to tilt the system into making money from over estimates and ticketed under estimates that is.
Yeah, I agree: In this respect the new system is BETTER. I’d rather know what time the meter expires, because with the old system that’s the first thing I figure out.
It’s also connects to sexy drives.
Attention! You have 5 minutes to move your car!
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Attention! If you do not move your car immediately, it will be crushed into a cube!
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Attention! You have 5 minutes to move your cube!
(The Simpsons)
Yeah, I was a little surprised to see this rant. It does suck that you can’t ever ever ever get free time on the meter before five or six at night, but on the plus side, I don’t have to have change – but I CAN use all my change if I want. The little paper receipts are stupidly made and I’d prefer having a little parking-spot code number… or, better yet, put my license plate number in there! That and only paying for the time you use by charging when I leave and sending me a text when I have 5 or 10 minutes remaining would make parking awesome.
Depends on whether the parking spaces have those sensors that tell whether the space is occupied.
If it does, then charge them to the time they leave. If not, charge them up to the next time someone starts paying for that parking space.
But the city’s businesspersons also don’t want your overall shopping experience to be an unpleasant one. A few of those $25 tickets, and you find yourself shopping at the mall rather than downtown, because you don’t get ticketed in the mall’s parking lot.
But pretty much everyone has a cell phone and every cell-phone I’ve ever seen has a clock.