Montreal Parking Meters Run Linux

jbecherv writes "According to LinuxDevices.com, new-fangled Montreal parking meters run embedded Linux (Google Cache). The City of Montreal is planning to roll out 500 to 800 wireless, solar-powered parking payment stations based on embedded Linux. There is even a device profile (Google Cache) that show some details about the meters... These meters run kernel 2.4.19 on a 206MHz StrongARM SA-1110. Each system has 64MB of RAM, boots from a CF device, and is networked wirelessly via GPRS."

Comments

Solar powered?

[Kenja]

I can't recall where it was, but some other city tried using solar powered parking meters. They never worked due to insufficient light.

Re:Solar powered?

[re-Verse]

Toronto uses them. I'm not sure if they use a backup power source as well (I guess they must) But if you live in TO, take a look on top of one of he master nodes (where you put in cash/CC and get a ticket for your card, and you will notice the whole top is a solar panel.

I have no idea how much (if any) money this saves, but I think its really cool... and got way too excited about it the first time I noticed it.

how hackable is something like this?

[circletimessquare]

i'm not saying embedded windows is safer, i'm just wondering if someone could easily hack this system, it would be interesting if someone got free parking in the city

Detroit parking meters

[millahtime]

Detroit is rolling out high tech ones too

Re:I know little about embedded devices

[and by]

But there's no harddrive, so it can't use swap space and it has to have the whole (probably very small) filesystem in RAM.

it would be cool...

[foQ]

it would be cool if you could pay for your car online if a meeting runs long or something. other than that, this seems like more of a waste of money and raises the risk of them getting stolen. stealing the old fashioned ones is cool, but stealing a bunch of portable solar computers would be bad-ass!

spare MHz?

[Janek Kozicki]

few hunderds of spare 200 MHz ? I wonder if their administrator will resist the tempation of installing disturbed computing client (like seti@home, or distcc >;-)

Re:great.

[Frohboy]

Montreal actually has an excellent subway system, and fairly narrow, busy downtown roads. (More European-like than any other city I've been to in North America.)

As someone who learned to drive on the crazy downtown streets of Montreal, I feel I can happily endorse city's public transit. :)

Where is the soruce code?

[David Hume]

The Device Profile states, "The stations run a Linux distribution that 8D developed in-house." Where is the source code? I searched:

8D

http://www.8d.com/

But couldn't find anything. How can we efficiently build on 8D's work to build a better, competitive parking meter without the code?

parking tickets

[Barbarian]

Sounds like these meters will automatically tell the parking officer when your time is up. They could even combine them with pavement sensors and photo recognition (or RFID!) in the future to automatically ticket you.

Another reason to steal parking meters...

[puppetman]

In greater Vancouver, we have dodgey characters that drive around with hacksaws, decapitating the meters for the change inside. A thousand dollar parking meter gets destroyed for $40 in change.

In Montreal, it will be geeks with hacksaws. Rather than being tossed into a lake, the parking meters will show up in a home-built robot.

Parking meters are not more reliable

[neile]

There was an article in the Seattle PI today about Seattle's plans to do this exact same change:

Up to 80 parking meters are out of service on any given day, Krawczyk said. The pay stations are much more reliable.

The article also talks about how Portland made the same switchover, and the successes they had:

"They've worked wonderfully for us," McCoy said, adding that "Seattle people have been down here on a number of occasions" to study the Portland pay stations. Portland's pay stations have been less expensive to maintain than the oft-malfunctioning meters. And the credit cards have reduced the costs of handling coins, he said. "From a customer perspective, having the ability to make card transactions has been the big benefit down here," he said. About 50 percent of Portland's parking revenue now comes via credit cards.

Neil

Q Temperature?

[4of12]

Solar powered is great, but what happens when those Montreal winters come blasting?

Most batteries don't fare well as the temperature plummets towards -40, either.

Re:Instructions

[sahonen]

I dunno about you, but most parking meters I've seen have been made out of nice, solid metal to keep people from breaking in and taking out the change. I think these meters would be built the same.

Also, they would probably have batteries to keep them running during periods of no sun... Otherwise, free parking on cloudy days, or you put in your money, come back and have a parking ticket because a cloud passed over the sun and reset the meter.

These machines suck

[Cyclone66]

Here's why:

There's one meter per block, at each parking spot there's a sign with a number. A123 or A435, B342, etc. You read your number, go to ANY machine in Montreal, punch in that number and you can put money in your meter. Now this is where they got greedy. They got sick of people using leftover time from previous 'customers' so any time you add money to a specific spot it resets to 0.

So if there is 2 hours on the machine and I want to add an hour (you can only have a max of 3 hours) I will have to pay for the full 3 hours. Furthermore you can not see how much money is left on the meter except by looking at the ticket it prints.

So if you have class and need to add a bit of money to the meter so it'll last till the end of class you have to add the full amount since it will restart.

Now for the mischief. There's nothing stopping you from punching in someone else's number, adding 25 cents and reducing there time to 15 minutes! Essentially guaranteeing a ticket.

So if someone has 3 hours on there meter, and you come by and put in 25 cents it will go to 15 minutes. This can be handy to use against people you don't like or just random strangers with nice cars, etc. Anyways it seems like a big problem.

The only thing I was thinking is that maybe the machine will keep track of the OLD value as well as the new value to prevent this, but it's still screwing over people who want to add money to their own meter.