Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Or if they have the technology installed that knows when you pull your car out, just swipe it once when you arrive.
Someone asks me for the correct time at least once a day. A different someone, that is.
If money is so tight an extra $0.50 is going to impact you, maybe you shouldn’t be going out to lunch in the first place?
But anyway, I do agree with you that it wouldn’t hurt to explicitly put the number of minutes you bought for people who don’t know how to subtract. I just don’t think it’s the crushing injustice that you paint in your OP.
Just be glad they’re not using the parking meters Tokyo used back in the early 1990s. Those things were evil and had the following features:
[ul][li]Automatically began timing you stay once you parked.[/li][li]Zeroed out when you drove away from the spot, meaning that there was no time left on the meter for someone else to get for free.[/li][li]When your time expired, a miniature version of a police car cherry started strobing to notify the parking enforcement officer to come give you a ticket.[/li][li]If you drove away without paying, the cherry also strobed. I don’t recall if there was also a camera positioned to get an image of the license plate.[/ul][/li]
Yeah. Those were fun. Over here, we have two kinds of street parking:
[ul][li]Human parking meter–some guy retired from another job hangs out on the street, covering both sides of the road for two blocks. You pay him for how long you intend to be there. If you depart earlier than intended, the city just got free money from you.[/li]Free for all, aka illegal parking. Name your type of illegal street parking and we have it in trumps. There’s parking on the sidewalk, parking in the restricted zone, double parking, triple parking. And I’ll never forget the classic quadruple parking that blocked traffic for a good hour. I can’t leave out just plain parking in the middle of the street either. That one’s quite popular. Tickets are rarely issued for any of this.[/ul]
But don’t you need a watch or some form of access to time piece regardless of the type of meter? I mean with an old meter, you might know you put in 2 hours worth of money, but how will you know when that 2 hours is close to being up?
I don’t see how the shift to this type of meter impacts the poor watchless of society.
Did anyone else notice this asshole is using a parking meter so he can spend two hours getting drunk?
After getting drunk, and the meter runs out, what exactly is he planning to do? Can we also assume he’s left his kid in the back seat with the windows up?
It’s fucks like this that make me think the parking meter SHOULD require a skill testing question, otherwise his car should should.
I couldn’t agree more. The implied contract in this situation is that every driver should pay for parking in these spaces. The new machines ensure that this actually happens, and I’m glad the city is making more revenue. I would even say that the new system is more fair.
I mean, yes, the free parking was cool, but making every driver who parks at a meter pay is actually a fair system.
What the fuck are you talking about? An apple is a physical object and goes bad over time. “Parking minutes” are a social construct, and the idea that you would get mad for “wasting” them is beyond silly. It’s like the students who complain that they “earned points” on a quiz, as if the “points” themselves were objects I had stolen from them (as opposed to whether the grade given was fair for the response given).
Busy bar beside major street. Mall parking on other side of street that bar patrons used after hours.
People complaining to City Hall about drivers not being diligent enough in avoiding the drunk people crossing the busy street to their cars. People also wanted a special pedestrian crossing (they had to walk a bit on their side to get to a traffic light with crossing).
The saddest part was that on the online newspaper article, people were commenting in support of a measure to protect the drunks walking across the street to their cars.
Yes, and in between shots of tequila I will enjoy clubbing baby harp seals and juggling severed baby heads.
With your mom.
Heh; my city pretends to be green, too, but one of their favourite games is, “Ohmygod, people are driving on that road! Shut it down and make them either drive further to get where they’re going or get herded onto a busier street so they can spend more time stuck in traffic jams.”
It would be really awesome if that was actually accurate, and knowing the Dope, there’s a good chance it is. 
I noticed the big sign in a parking lot using the cellphone system the other day - “DID YOU REMEMBER TO CALL AND END YOUR SESSION?” I’m guessing it’s a bit of a problem.
The on-the-street machines do indeed suck - we were trying to go to a restaurant downtown on a Saturday evening a while ago, and were trying to figure out from the machine if we were into the free parking time yet - we couldn’t find a way to make the machine cough up this information, so we went to a different restaurant with free parking.
That’s, uh, a good point.
If you had trouble with an ultra-modern parking meter, you probably lack both the coordination to juggle, and the opposable thumbs required to use a club.
And if you refer to something that’s been around for at least 15 years as “ultra modern” I doubt you could handle anyone’s mother.
As a lesson to us all, had SDMB required a skill testing question before posting, we might never had enjoyed this tasty little nugget.
I never have problems with parking meters for the simple reason that I don’t patronize cities that install them.
People patronize cities?
Your location field seems to be an attempt at cleverly stating “Los Angeles”. I guess you don’t live in L.A. anymore?
That’s the most common kind of parking meter around here. The unwritten rule is that if you have a significant amount of time left, the polite thing to do is ask the next person to come along if they’d like the receipt to display in their car.
Meh. Giraffe is just here because his board’s Pit doesn’t work worth shit. He hasn’t contributed to this board in a long time, and you do best to ignore him.
What? His first post here is just to make fun of the OP.
I do live in LA, but not the city itself. There’s plenty of places you can go without paying parking meters. Most malls and strip malls charge nothing for parking, and the ones that do charge usually give away the first couple hours if you buy anything.
If I must pay to park, I go to a lot that has a flat fee. I simply don’t go anywhere that requires feeding timed meters.
Well then now you’re just being silly. If you don’t park at the meter but the meters are still there then you are “patronizing a city” that uses parking meters. Obviously there are lots and lots of parking meters in L.A. whether you use them or not.
Sorry for my lack of clarity. By “the city” I mean the “downtown” businesses that have only on-street parking.