Have you been to a parking lot where one machine is the meter for a whole parking lot? How does this work from the parking enforcement side? Isn’t it a pain compared to a lot with individual meters? Is there an advantage here over a metered lot?
Lazy collectors get the money all from one spot?
The ones I have been to recently that have one machine. You pay and get a slip of paper that you then put on your dash that indicates the time that you paid. It seems to be much less of a pain from the lot operators point of view. Only one machine and it seems pretty easy to determine who has paid or not. From the parkers point of view it is more of a hassle since you have to go back to put the ticket on your car.
In the olden days there was a box with numbered slots for each parking space and you shoved your money in the slot. There did not seem to be a good way to determine if you had paid or the previous car in that space had paid but it looked cheap to operate.
Isn’t this a more expensive solution than having a metered lot using old-fashioned parking meters? Maybe it’ll pay for itself in the long run?
Couple of advantages for the entity receiving the payment- one is that collections take less time. Not necessarily that the collectors are lazy, but some of these machines are in large parking lots. Much faster to empty one machine instead of 20 or 30. Also, with the old fashioned individual meters, if I paid for two hours and left after one, you could pull in and use the rest of my time. Much harder with the receipt system (although I’ve seen people pass on the receipt to a potential parker), and probably impossible with the meters where you enter your parking space number after paying. Also, most of them around here will accept debit/credit cards or a prepaid parking card. The old meters only took quarters.
One device rather than 20 to 50 devices? Less maintenance & easier service. Seams to me to be the cheaper way to go.
They’ve been the norm for new meters here for almost a decade now. Doreen’s pretty much summed up the advantages for the operators. It’s also pretty easy to spot cars without a receipt.
Sucks for us though - especially when the nearest machine’s out of order (out of paper most likely) and you have to walk to another one.
In the Sydney CBD on-street meters also now no longer accept cash at all, credit card only. So they save a lot by not having to have folks going around emptying them all the time, let alone the maintenance of the coin mechanisms. What you are supposed to do if you don’t have a CC I don’t know.
In my town, you don’t need to put the receipt in the car window. Presumably the parking enforcement officer has some sort of handheld device that tells him which parking spots are paid for until which time. The machines take credit cards as well as coins, which is useful for someone like me who doesn’t carry change. Also, because the system is centralized and computerized, it’s relatively easy to adjust parking rates for time of day or day of week.
I’ve heard that some towns where you do put the receipt in the window don’t have marked spots in which to park, so that if you can squeeze three cars in what would have been two marked spots, that’s fine with them.