Top off Your Parking Meter with a Cell Call

dstone writes "Vancouver, Canada has just become the first major city in North America to allow motorists to feed their parking meters with their cell phone. Drivers call a number on each meter, the system recognizes them by Caller ID, they enter how many minutes they want, and that's it. The system sends them a reminder text message before their time is up and they can extend their time remotely. The catch? The company contracted to provide the service, Verrus, makes their money through a 30-cent 'convenience fee.' Less pockets full of change, less parking tickets, seems like a step forward."

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[Aqua_boy17]

...feed their parking meters with their cell phone

I'd like to try this, but I can't seem to fit my phone into the coin slot. Maybe if I bought a Razr?

Re:Kinda defeats a parking meter feature

[Chosen Reject]

Grocery store! You lazy slob. Grow your own wheat.

Re:Kinda defeats a parking meter feature

[Icculus]

Three more words (or 2 if you count a hyphenated word as one):

Angle-grinder Man

Re:Kinda defeats a parking meter feature

[DavidTC]

I think they go around chalking more often. Like every hour. So when they make the third mark they know you've been there too long. Although I guess it obviously would vary based on how many cops there are.

And while I rarely side with the police on stuff like this, honestly, that's about the easiest and least privacy-invading way to prevent mistakes. Yes, they could go around writing down all the plates, or just photographing the cars, or even have video cameras up, but I'd rather have chalk. They could stick notes on the car, but that's just pointless litter when most people will be gone after one of them. (If they mark the tires, they presumably mark a specific place on them, so if you move the car, the mark's not in the right place. Or they could just use different colors on different streets.)

Plus, now there's an opening for 'The Anti-Chalk', a superhero who goes around erasing the marks off cars so people don't get tickets. ;) Which would be, like, the most trivial superhero job in the universe. Damp-Cloth Man. You could rig a wet-nap to the side of your shoe or something.

Re:Wrong Number?

[fireboy1919]

lots of meters that are expiring at the same time so they know where to concentrate their "efforts"

So then...I can play "make the cops run around" by just getting a bunch of my friends on opposite sides of the street to buy only 15 minutes at a time and renew within the last 7 seconds?

Re:Kinda defeats a parking meter feature

[really?]

There is some law against damaging them things.

Now, depending on the "boot" and on your wheels, there are other ways. My brother, has a BUNCH of booths - as in more than 20 - in a corner of his yard. He drives a Nissan SUV with BIG ass off road tyres. If he returns to his car and finds it "booted", he lets the air out of the tyre, and bends a small piece of the booth. He then removes the boot, bends back the small piece, re-inflates the tire with a small electric pump he always has in the back, throws the boot in his car and drives away. I asked him why he didn't just leave the boot behind, and he said "I wouldn't want anyone to take it and sell it for scrap metal." Once every few months he loads all the boots in his car and "dumps" them at the gate of one the smaller police stations in the town, since in the country he lives in right now it's the cops that put the boots on. He thinks this is funny.