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"Smart" Parking Meters Considered Dumb
theodp writes "The jury's still out on whether Chicago taxpayers were taken to the cleaners by a rushed 75-year lease of the city's metered parking to a Morgan Stanley consortium. But most would probably agree that the new shared Pay Boxes that replaced the city's old parking meters don't exactly live up to their 'Smart' billing. Here's what the redesigned 'user-friendly' parking solution looks like: 1. Park your car. 2. Walk up to 1/2 block to a Pay Box. 3. Wait in line to use it. 4. Use coins or credit cards to purchase parking time — up to $84 for 24-hours (add $50 if you run out of time). 5. Wait for a paper receipt to be printed. 6. Walk up to 1/2 block back to your car. 7. Place the receipt on your dashboard. 8. Head off to your destination, perhaps passing the Pay Box a second time. So before other cities suffer the same fate as Chicago, Portland, and others, is there a 'smarter' way? Some suggest the ParkMagic In-Car Meter, but no new orders are being taken in Chicago. Any other ideas?"
If only there was some sort of token people could use to activate the meters... But it would have to be something almost everyone carries. Hmmm...
Then have the customer enter the spot number they parked in at the pay box. No return trip, no silly paper receipt to put on the dash board, no worries. Was that so hard?
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What happens if parking enforcement comes around while you're in the middle of the walk-wait-pay-walk process?
Ask anyone in Chicago who isn't on Daley's payroll, and they can tell you that the jury is not out on the parking meters: Daley, once again, did whatever the fuck he wanted and the residents, once again, were screwed over.
The parking meters described are user hostile to the population of Chicago. However, they do a much better job of keeping the life of the organization that bought them and runs them easy than having to physically collect coins from so many different parking meters.
The government is not the people.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
The ParkMagic in-car meter is a scam on the part of the city to steal your paid-for parking time from you. (To be fair, the new smart meters a half a block away from you are probably a scam too). It used to be that if you had extra time on the meter, someone else could park there for the extra time and save themselves money. Considering that if someone else left with extra time you could park in their spot and take advantage of the free time, over the long run it would tend to average out that you were only paying for the actual time you spent parked in your spot.
Now with the new changes, nobody else can take advantage of leftover time on your meter when you leave, and you can't get any kind of refund. So all of the extra time that people pay for -- the city's getting their money for free.
Similar installations have been deployed where I live, and have already had one major benefit:
Fewer people are taking cars in to town.
Though I'm not sure the local retailers share my enthusiasm on that one.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The whole idea of a smart meter is (or should be) efficiency. It should be efficient for the municipality to collect fees, and it should be efficient for the user to use. That seems pretty self-evident to me. To that end, it is completely reasonable to expect a system that lets you pay electronically at the meter itself. Having to go out of your way an extra block, especially if you're planning on going the other direction, is completely unreasonable. And It has nothing to with fitness. It has everything to do with wasting time that you shouldn't have to spend to begin with. Smart meters should make the process better, not worse.
That only really works if parking is a nearly unlimited commodity. Unmetered parking when parking is scarce just leads to people circling forever, like New York City.
I mean, sure, no payment is always the most convenient option, because you don't have to deal with payment. You could avoid the hassle of tokens or payment cards on a subway if subway rides were free, too.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Burbank is not Chicago. I haven't been to Burbank, but if it's an economical use of space in Burbank to put down free parking lots you can't even compare it to a real city (defined by density and layout -- Burbank is certainly a real place where people do real things, but it doesn't sound very urban) like Chicago. Parking meters are put on commercial streets because if they weren't people would park there indefinitely. The summary complains that it would cost $84 to park in some of these places for 24 hours. That's the point! To prevent people from doing that so that the street parking spots are open for convenient access to businesses and city buildings. You don't want parking across from City Hall or the main library downtown clogged with commuters, so use high per-hour rates to push them into parking garages. And you wouldn't want all the spots outside neighborhood cafés and restaurants occupied by residents, so you use meters to keep them on the residential streets (where, if there is a parking shortage, the landlords have an incentive to actually provide parking, which is somewhat rare in many older neighborhoods).
Probably because the real reader was pried out and replaced with a card skimmer :)
The whole point of meters was to encourage people to be quick and move on, freeing up parking so others can patronize the same businesses. That's why there are time limits and feeding the meter is illegal in many places, even if you own the car.
Perhaps instead it's time to rethink the whole concept of meters and find a better way to accomplish the task. Preferably one which leaves as few hazards in a too-narrow roadway as it is. Something like.. valet parking, satellite lots, underground parking (I understand this has been very successful in Boston, for instance), mass transit, etc.
It is clear to anyone with more sense than a turnip that individual transportation machines is not a solution that scales well. But it's tricky because it's not enough to have the bandwidth, a viable "public transportation" option needs to have equivalent or better latency, too.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Wow.
It has everything to do with wasting time that you shouldn't have to spend to begin with.
Really? Your life is so busy that you can't waste the minute or so it takes to walk *half a block out of your way*?
Actually, it does. No wonder people in this country are such fat-asses. They complain about walking half a damn block and try to rationalize it as "wasting time". Buddy... enjoy your life. If you live your life by such a hectic schedule, it won't be the obesity that does you in, it will be your little ticker deciding it doesn't like all this stress you are putting on it and subsequently deciding to malfunction--aka a heart attack.
Sheesh. One half block.
Issuing speeding tickets is not a "service".
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It's not 'free time' The meter is still counting down, and just because someone else paid doesn't make it 'free time', except to you. The city is still getting paid for the time.
Now, if the city wants a way to be able to get paid for 12 hours of parking in an 8 hour stretch, ok, then the sensors can make you pay every time you enter the space. So they make the minimum time say 60 minutes in front of the dry cleaners and shops, and people come and go every 15-20 minutes, so the meter gets the hour minimum 2-3-4 times an hour. Nice.
But I don't live in Chicago, and never have, so I don't expect my city government to deliberately screw me at every opportunity.
We are learning a lot more about Chicago-style politics than I ever wanted to...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I don't understand the modern viewpoint that cars are evil, and their usage should be discouraged. They are simply an update of the classic horse-and-cart that humans have used for 10,000 years, and the reason humans used these carts was because they were great for carrying lots of stuff.
Don't believe me? Well I just bought almost a month's worth of groceries. Try carrying 20 bags onto the local subway or bus or walk home. I think I'll keep my horseless cart. Thanks.
As to the point of the article - This is just more of the same politician stupidity that gave us hackable, error-prone computer voting (and eventually led to the return of paper ballots). Just because something is "new" doesn't mean it's better than the old system. The old mechanical meters invented in the 1920s may not be sexy, but they get the job done, and as this article demonstrates the new meters are not any better.
An upgrade to new tech is only worthwhile if it's an actual UPgrade, rather than a downgrade.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You, like most people miss the point of the new meters. They transfer the cost of use directly onto the driver. Where as the old meters had to be emptied and maintained by the thousands, these new meters can be emptied less often (more CC, less coin) and there are an order of magnitude less of them.
The ones they installed in Portland even have a spiffy automated cart that empties them. The meter maids pull up in their special golf carts, and the machine does the rest. It's considerably cheaper for the city itself, and the "cost" is the same to the driver. With the added bonus of slightly more hassle. It's also no longer possible to break a meter to get free parking, something I have seen done more than once. Now if the local meter is broken, you are supposed to find the next nearest one and use it instead.
The only downside for the city is the increase in pedestrian accidents because people are forced to cross the street (usually mid block) to get to the meter on the other side. And then back again. Most people just jaywalk, and this causes accidents. Portland had an expose about it a year or so ago, but I can't be bothered to dig through the horrid oregonian website to find it.
There are plenty of transport options of which you missed buses, local train services, crossrail, private coach operators, mopeds, motorcycles, electric/hybrid vehicles, taxis. Yes the tube is fairly expensive but public transport in London is still pretty good considering the load it works under.
As for cars, screw cars. The congestion charge was introduced in because cars ground London to a standstill. For 95% of commuters there is no reason at all to drive in anyway since central London (where charging occurs) is very well supplied with tube and bus routes. If you absolutely must drive and don't want to pay the charge, you have plenty of other choices, including driving hybrids and electric vehicles which incur no charge.
Does that mean London's transport system is perfect? Far from it but it works and works quite well aside from when the unions decide to go on strike.
You'd have to pay and maintain a force of a lot more attendants than are currently needed.
The real problem is that we don't think that's a good idea.
We offshore all manufacturing and remote-service (telephone). Then we automate as much existing service as we can.
End result: No one has a fucking job.
Perhaps we should just, you know, hire a people at ten dollars an hour to run around photographing cars, or at least emptying meters, instead of building a giant multi-million dollar system.
The real joke is that half these multi-million dollar systems don't work right, so end up getting replaced way before they make back the money they cost. And the half that work are via 'partnerships' with private industries who pay for the cost, but then skim so much off the top that they don't make as much money as they did originally either.
We're spending more money to have less jobs and a crappier system. The only advantage is that private companies selling the system make more money, and I don't...oh, wait. I get it now.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'd rather do daily groceries by bike.
Do you have children? Do you live with a partner? Does s/he work? My wife and I each work and get home from work at around 5:30. We have dinner with our daughter around 6 or 6:30, then bath time, story time and bed time with one parent, while the other parent cleans up from dinner. Then it's an hour or so of 'us' time, before we head to bed. Where exactly in our schedule is this mythical time to do 'daily groceries by bike' in the dark pouring rain in February?