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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."
Actually, here in Calgary CANADA, there's been a big hubub recently about people parking all day at parking meters and just paying the fine. It was cheaper to pay the $25 fine than to pay $28 for eight hours of parking.
Apparently a secretary for couple of law offices would regularily just walk into city hall with a list of license numbers of the partners and pay off all the fines on-masse
City of Calgary is considering raising the daily fine to $300 now
I remember the first time (too many years back, now) that I experienced Convenience while I was in line at a McDonalds grabbing a burger on my way someplace. I told the cashier I wanted a Diet Coke as my combo drink. She handed me the now-expected empty cup and told me that I would be getting the drink from the "Convenience Center" across the store.
"Convenient for who?" I asked. And she told me, unblinkingly, that it had in fact really made their job a lot easier.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
To use a washer, text the word "SLUG" to 91111.
Here in Chicago, most parking meters have a time limit for parking. So it will say 25c / 30 minutes, 2 hour limit.
In Chicago, it appears that enforcement of this is half hearted (compared with places like Carmel where they use chalk to mark the tires to enforce the time limit).
Anyway, it would not be hard for the cell phone parking meter to enforce the time limit. So after 4 quarters, the parking meter won't take any more money and the driver has to move.
Wouldn't it be great if the parking meter could tell that you hadn't paid or moved the car and then issued the cell phone an instant meter violation charge? I believe that is $50 in Chicago. Plus a 30 cent convenience fee.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?