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."

Comments

Re:Kinda defeats a parking meter feature

[Mister Whirly]

Hey, that asshole chose to be a meter maid. If he didn't realize there may be a negative perception of his job duties, he has no business in law enforcement. All they do is issue fines, not help people like real cops (occasionally) do.

Re:Kinda defeats a parking meter feature

[b0s0z0ku]

Congrats, asshole. Way to ruin a guy's day while he was doing his job. We've all been pissed about parking tickets, but the onus is on the owner of the car to make sure the meter is paid, not the person in charge of writing tickets.

Personally, I wouldn't give a rat's ass if half of all the cops in the US *lost* their jobs and starved on the street. This country is overpoliced as it is, and the laws are becoming more and more rigid (mandatory life sentences, etc). Then, if I saw one begging, I'd throw a steel washer or one of those knockout plugs from an electrical box into his cup :)

If cops/meter maids get enough abuse, they may even quit their jobs voluntarily and find something more productive to do...

-b.

Re:Kinda defeats a parking meter feature

[ericdano]

Interesting and fulfilling things like Troll Slashdot? It takes 15 minutes to shop at the store. And hell, I live in walking distance as well.

Oh, but you are Canadian. I know what you are talking aboot. You live in some frigid area where it's like 50 miles to get to any place that has more than 50 people living together in a thing called a city.

Yeah, ok, in your case I can see how it can take HOURS to shop.

Re:"Convenience" fees! Heh.

[Red Flayer]

And in any case, I don't think a thing like this is worth being a dick about to other people and ruining their day. You've lost perspective

I think you've got it backwards. You've never gained perspective, which is why you don't see the value. Extrapolate that action to a million similar actions, whether it's popcorn or soda or any consumer item. Where does that leave us?

As an employee of a movie theater, why should you complain about doing your job? How is it 'making their life hell' by bringing to their attention something that is part of their job? Is laziness and unwillingness to fulfill job requirements the reason that it makes their life hell?

Knowing better, I can honestly say that someone getting a free refill on popcorn is absolutely not going to increase popcorn prices for anyone else at all.

Obviously you've never worked in pricing, or taken a microeconomics class that discusses pricing in depth. If you're working for a chain store, those refills are accounted for, as are full-price sales -- and both sets of data are used in the pricing model. It's not about how much popcorn is thrown away (a full bag of popcorn costs about $.25, IIRC, so it's meaningless) it's about how much to charge to maximize revenue. When employees don't ring up the refills, they really skew the demand curve -- since people buying refills signifies that the full price is too high, and the chain could likely increase revenues by lowering the price. When the fraudulent refills are rung up, they also skew the demand curve -- though without seeing the numbers who knows how it would affect the curve, and thus the optimal pricing.