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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?"
Yay, first post!
They have those things in Sacramento California also, they suck! I hate them! They're the worst!
I heard in some cities though that they place sensors under the parking spots that reset the meter whenever somebody removes their car, as another way of making sure nobody gets any free time.
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...
If one were to forge the ticket (which can not be examined closely while under the dash glass...), I wonder how often the meter readers would actually check the machine data or ticket number/serial?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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?
Robot Parking Garage
You can build them upwards, you can build them downwards. They take up so much less space than sidewalk parking. Properly designed, they can park and retrieve vehicles really freaking fast.
This reminds me of the Gwinnette County traffic camera deal in Georgia where a private company took over a public service and it goes to heck. Granted the camera deal included a kickback from every ticket, so the company exploited the system to issue more tickets, but still... ideas like this should be brought before the public before implementation so that these problems have a chance to be thought through. Let me step down from the soapbox...
Body in a woodchipper...HA HA!
Also, the new meters could have worked, but the out-sourcing to a private company destroyed any hope of that.
An example of their ineptitude: they forgot to put batteries in some of the meters, making it impossible to get the magic slip of paper, and then ticketed people for it.
We have a pretty decent system in Calgary. The pay boxes are easily found downtown, and the payment is linked to your license plate so you don't need to go back to your car. Also payment via cellphone is available. All in all I like the new system compared to the old time meters.
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.
old style meters if you park at one with time left over then the city "lost" money
new meters when you park unless someone gives you a ticket with time on it you have to pay even if the person before you didn't use all their time
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
Maybe something similar to the toll system called ezpass. http://www.ezpass.com/
Instead call it e-zpark or whatever. After being in your parking spot for X amount of time, charge your account for it. That way, you don't pay for time not used and you also don't have to waste time feeding the meter. You also won't be dupped into feeding the meter when they're free (such as on the weekend or after hours). For spots with a time limit, they could increase the rate after you've reached the time limit and/or send you a txt message telling you that you're time was about up.
They even make these handy devices which can be used to hold quarters and fit in your car's cup holders, or stick themselves to something on the dashboard to the right of the driver, or....
If you don't park downtown regularly - great! $20 in quarters should last a long time. If you do park there regularly - all the more reason to be prepared and stocked up!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I've seen this in multitude of places world wide. Not so popular in US but exists here and there. What exactly is their problem? Walking half a block extra? I knew people in Chicago were some of the least fit in the country but this sounds like extreme whining. Would they prefer to walk back from wherever they are every hour to "feed the meter"? Or do they want a system that lets them pay without leaving the car? That's called a parking garage :)
The system isn't made to be fair. It's made to generate revenue. If more revenue can be generated by making you walk half of a block, hell, even an entire block, why not two, then it's going to be that way. The city has no vested interest in making things easier for its inhabitants if making things easier nets them less revenue.
Especially when you throw in a kickback or bribe to certain members that have the power to vote on these things...
It's all about corruption. Why replace perfectly good parking meters with a convoluted new system that will ensure that people get fined or at least ripped off on the price? Because it generates more money. Not because it's safer, or an improvement, or healthier, etc.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Here in Calgary there's a similar system called Park Plus. If you park downtown you have to find one of the park plus machines (they're not very hard to find, they're all over the place), and punch in your license plate # and a 4 digit code indicating where you're parked (those are on signs all over the place too). There's no receipt or parking pass though. The system is enforced by a set of trucks covered in cameras and antennas. I presume they automatically scan the license plate of every parked car and check against the central system whether you've paid or not. What's pretty cool about it is you can also setup a debit account with the system, and then pay through your cell phone- call the system once when you park to 'check in' and again when you leave to 'check out' and it deducts the payment from your account.
The system works pretty well in Vancouver, Canada.
You can use coins as normal or you can dial a phone number to pay by credit card. Each meter has a number used to identify it.
The first time you use it, you have to register a license and your credit card number. After that, it remembers it based on your caller id I would imagine. You can register multiple cars no problem. It's a bit of a pain enter your license the first time you use it (it would be nice if you could try to use voice recognition first) but after the first time, it's pretty smooth.
The nice thing is that you don't have to go back to your car when you run out of time. To me, that is the biggest pain of street parking. Forget that you have to go half a block to pay for parking. If you have to run back from a few blocks, or in the middle of eating, that is even worse. With the system, we just call the number again and it asks if you want to extend your time. You just enter how many minutes.
I usually use it like this: (a) put in as many coins as I have and take a picture of the meter which has the id number with my iPhone (b) if I'm not back by the amount of time I got from the coins, I call and add time.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Where I live, Burbank, CA, we got rid of all parking meters -- and good riddance to boot! You can park anywhere in Burbank without paying a fee -- pull into any city lot and go to the local AMC Theater, watch a movie --> head on over to your favorite eating spot, have a bit to eat --> head on over to the ice cream shop, get a double-dipper --> browser the magazine shop, read later PC Magazine --> walk the Media Center Mall, hang out with friends --> finally head back to your car! NO RUNNING TO DROP QUARTER. Nice
The Spice Must Flow!
They make me furious! Okay, so the buttons are not well labeled, because these things sit in the sun all day and of course, the stickers, and the LCD screen will fade/lose intensity and become unreadable. Well, there is a button next to the add-time button that is 'add maximum time'. Okay, so what if you accidentally press that (which I've done) and cant see the dollar amount it tells you, it just says 'REMOVE CARD' and you have to remove your credit card to get it back, so when you remove it, it swipes, and boom, the transaction goes through for the maximum amount of time possible! So, yes I could have avoided it had I 1) not pressed the wrong button 2) been able to see the screen 3)known what happened and pressed the cancel button - BUT NONE of those happened and instead I paid more than I've ever paid for parking - including in a garage. Great engineering their folks.
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.
Everyone says they want cities to stop over spending on infrastructure and to have realistic services but every time they inconvenience you just a little bit it's back to "spend spend spend! I can't walk half a block!"
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
I'm a Portland resident and have been in constant contact with these meters since they were installed a few years back. Seriously, they are not that bad! I don't know why there is even a debate about them. They are reasonably dispersed in Portland, so the "have to walk" argument does not apply. The price is about what you would expect for street parking... And anybody stupid enough to be street parking for 24 hours deserves the cost. You need overnight? Try a garage. Much cheaper.
So far, no drawbacks. Plus you can use a credit/debit card. I was thrilled when these went in here in Portland, and I haven't changed my mind yet.
Can somebody please give a solid answer as to why these meters are a problem?
In a number of cities in Israel you purchase scratch-off cards in connivence-stores. When you want to park you scratch the date/time off the card (to "activate" it) and hang it in your window. I think its pretty brilliant. No physical infrastructure to maintain. To money/coins to collect. If the city wants to change the price of parking - they just change it. No machines to update.
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).
1. Park your car.
2. Walk up to 1/2 block to store entrance.
3. Wait in line to enter and obtain a cart.
4. Pass the checkout counters and walk the equivalent of two or three blocks inside the stoor while manually loading groceries.
5. Wait in line to pay using coins or credit cards.
6. Wait for a paper receipt to be printed.
7. Walk up to 1/2 block back to your car.
8. Place the groceries in the car.
9. Head off to your destination.
10. Carry groceries inside destination.
11. Store groceries in various locations depending on consumability and shelf life at room temperature.
Embarassingly, it is already like this in Portland, Chicago and other cities worldwide.
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?!
Whining about walking half a block. No wonder that not only does everybody think Americans are fat and lazy but that we really are. Come on, it's just a few parking spots well within sight of your car. If you have trouble walking that far and back, you really have no business even leaving your assisted care facility that you must live in.
Anyway, Seattle has the same ones that Portland has and they're great. Get a sticker to put on your car that can be paid with a card if you don't have tons of change. Works for the time you buy anywhere in the city. I can buy one sticker and be good for an afternoon of running errands. If the meter by my car is broke, I can just walk to the next one and still pay. (Jesus, an around the corner walk must make it not worth leaving the house for TFA poster. I can only wonder how they always manage to get a parking spot in front of where they want to go.)
If I was to bitch about such things, it would be because in Seattle, now that they've replaced all the old parking meters (which were usually broken and misread the time time elapsed anyway), they've started putting them in all the places that used to be free parking. It's getting harder and harder to find a spot thats not metered. Since I live in the older part of town (Capitol Hill) near downtown, street parking near my apartment which was hard enough to come by in a neighborhood where lots of buildings predate the common use of the car is now disappearing all together.
Oh my god. I dropped my cheesy fries, ice cream and XXL soda and almost had a heart attack just thinking about walking up to half a block! Please resuscitate me when somebody comes up with a drive-through parking meter payment system.
In Ann Arbor, the "smart" meters are susceptible to an exploit where if you add 5 cents of time to a meter, you remove all the existing time on that meter. For $1, a prankster can reset 20 parking spots and watch everyone get parking tickets. More info at this screenshot of a now-deleted comment on AnnArbor.com.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
And painted lines are either too small to parallel park your stupid Hummer, or a massive waste of space to park a smart car. Without lines, you can squeeze more cars into a block because people get right on each others ass--which is the way it should be. Everybody should get on each others ass, that way there is no wasted space.
Put in lines, and you waste an assload of space so some idiot can parallel park his boat-car.
No thanks. I'll keep my city streets free of painted lines and if they become painted, I (and most of my neighbors) will take the suggestion, but if there is enough space, we'll happily park our cars between the lines. After all, when it takes 15 or 25 minutes to find a space, if my car can fit, I'm parking it--fuck your lines.
PS: nothing makes me smile more than grown men who need their wife/girlfriend/friend to get out and guide them into *giant* spot. Buddy, I can park your car so there is only two inches between the guy in front and the guy behind and do it without tapping either bumper. It takes a while, but as I said, when you look for 25 minutes to find a spot--if I even think I can fit, fuck it, I'm going in!
You don't need to charge to enforce time limits. It is perfectly possible to have a "Max stay 1 hour" rule (enforced by ticketing or towing violators) without needing to charge everyone who doesn't overstay their welcome.
They work great in Portland Oregon. I don't mind walking a little ways and I can move to another spot and keep my time. The only thing I don't like about them is that they don't take dollar bills, only coins and cards.
Arlington, VA has recently replaced alot of their parking meters with them as well. Each space has an individual meter that works exactly like the old one did, except it can take a credit card as well. Problem solved.
Seattle has these meters and you can walk about three or four cars in any direction and find a meter. *Three or four cars* Gasp! I'm getting winded just typing about the horror!!!
In Taiwan it appears driver friendly rather than operator friendly. People just park and leave, then a parking inspector would come round every 30 minutes or something, take a photo of their number plate with a device, and leave a waterproof ticket on their windshield. Each time the inspector comes round he or she leaves more tickets on each windshield. When the driver comes back they get all the tickets and pay them at the nearest 7-11. I assume you have a certain grace period to pay the tickets.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
You'd think, but at least in Chicago, the privatization contract included anti-competitive clauses:
Section 3.12. Competing Off-Street Parking.
(a) Subject to Section 3.12(b) and Section 3.12(c). the City will not operate, and will not permit the operation of, a "Competing Public Parking Facility." A "Competing Public Parking Facility" means any off-street public parking lot or public parking garage that (i) is (A) owned or operated by the City or (B) operated by any Person and located on land owned by the City, or leased to the City, (ii) is within one mile of a Concession Metered Parking Space, (iii) is used primarily for general public parking; (iv) has a schedule of fees for parking motor vehicles that is less than three times the highest Metered Parking Fees then in effect for Concession Metered Parking Spaces in the same area; and (v) was not used for general public parking on the effective date of this Agreement.
It seems that someone finally found a way to get lazy, fat ass Americans to actually walk ONE block per day once in a while... ;)
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Here (in Bulgaria, Sofia) the only thing You have to do is to send an SMS with your car's registration number. And that is for one hour. If You see that one hour won't be enough then send another sms. I have template with my car's number so I press 2-3 buttons and voila parking is paid. The bill is included in your cell's one.
Many years ago, some shops used to transfer money from teller to a main booth by wires. Clip the money to the wire, shoot it from the teller to get change and whoosh it would come back. That's what they need here, wires and pulleys. Put your money in a tiny little sack on a string and whizz it alone the wire and the machine would take it, spit out a paper ticket and then whizz the sack back. It'd be awesome for the first five minutes, then you can marvel for years about the crazy parking system that lasted five minutes and then was vandalized. Planned nostalgia.
Task Mangler
Thank God that the government is turning over more of its functions to the private market.
Market? What market?
This is a 75-year lease. The government is turning over its functions to a private monopoly.
Why don't we just bring back the East India Company while we're at it?
The Three R's of Portland
or
Why Portland Sucks
"Latte Town" was coined a few years back and is the most appropriate term for the City of Portland that I have ever heard. A Latte town consists of mostly white, educated baby boomers and young single people. The inhabitants of the town are usually newcomers who have priced out all the original inhabitants. These towns are usually expensive, pretentious, abound in natural fibers and are laid back on the surface. Latte towns like Portland pride themselves on their most cherished concepts of diversity and inclusiveness. Most Portlanders accept this myth as Gospel but upon close examination Portland's dirty little secret is revealed. Portland is an overwhelmingly white, non-ethnic city. It is as vanilla as it gets so it makes one wonder what all the celebrating of diversity is all about. Drive through any neighborhood surrounding the downtown area and the impression that you get is that Portland is nothing more than a series of elitist ghettos compromised of rich white homosexuals, rich white yuppies, rich white hippies, rich white trust funders, and rich white kids from the suburbs pretending to be street people. Where's the diversity? Well it doesn't exist but the average Portlander likes the concept and in their eyes the different shades of rich whites all constituent diversity. In a series of articles I will attempt to breakdown and explain these subtle distinctions between the various factions of lily white, latte people that make Portland what it is.
The Artist-Intellectual
The visitor or newcomer to Portland is bound to be struck by the sheer numbers that belong to this group. They seem to be everywhere and are in fact everywhere. They are the reason that all the coffee shops have tables and chairs. The artist-intellectual fancies himself as a poet, a writer, a musician, a filmmaker, etc. You get the drift. They spend most of their days idling around the coffee establishments that one finds every 10 feet. They are usually equipped with a notebook that they use for their poems, journals or their artwork. No one ever gets to see the contents of these notebooks. More often than not they have a beaten and weathered paper back copy of some book authored by Kafka or William S. Boroughs. They love to discuss their favorite subject, themselves. Given the opportunity they will prattle on for hours about their poems, art work or the film they are making. You never get to actually see any of their work but you do get to hear about it. Their lives are like one never ending semester in grad school. Initially I believed these losers but then got to thinking. What would an aspiring actor, artist, musician, filmmaker being doing in Portland Oregon, a latte town? Why wouldn't they be in NYC or LA? Because they're phonies, that's why. Here's how it works with these clowns. They flunk out of college in New Jersey so their parents send them to Reed College in Portland in hopes that they will get their act together. They drop out of Reed but stay in Portland while still on Daddy's tab or some trust find. One Saturday Josh or Seth drifts down to one of the hundreds of hippie craft markets downtown. Some hippie is selling didgeridoos that he made I between bong reps. Josh buy one and takes it home where he proceeds to get baked after which he blows a few sour notes into the didgeridoo. The next day he's a musician. Not really but that's what he's telling everyone at the coffee house and pretending is good enough for a Portland artist-intellectual, in fact it's everything. In three months he will switch his designation from musician to filmmaker and then onto to something else 3 months later. As long as it sounds cool he will keep this charade up and no one in his circles will call him on it because they are doing the same thing.
The Activist
This group is usually comprised of people that used to be part of the artist-intellectual group in Portland. They have gotten a little older and may have finally, after 12 years, obtained a liberal arts degree from Portlan
and that is not a bad thing. Study after study has shown that by charging for parking you build in some the economic externalities into the cost of driving. think of it as a way to discourage congestion. it gives more people the opportunity to park downtown if people are discouraged from lingering. Sure you could charge more for gas or have fees to enter the city, or any number of things but this is easy to implement and has fewer side effects (as raising gas would). By making it difficult you pay with nuisance and wasted time rather than cash, which is a less regressive form of taxation.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Parking meters in Montréal are being replaced by smart Linux wireless solar-powered boxes. The whole of downtown is done by now.
To use them, you just need to note the parking spot number, then walk to the nearby pay station in which you key-in the spot number and pay (they take credit and bank cards) for the duration you plan to park. You get a receipt which you don’t need to put on your dashboard; the parking spot and duration is sent to a central server.
Parking enforcement agents (the legendary “ green onions ”) then are told by a hand-held computer which spots haven't been paid or are expired when they do their rounds. The computer only needs to be told the license plate number, and it prints the whole parking ticket automagically without subjecting the green onion to the risk of writer’s cramp (unfortunately, he still has to get out of his car and put it under the wipers).
Or maybe the Chicago ones are too sparse and the Portland ones are placed frequently enough?
Portland has twenty blocks per mile compared to the more typical ten blocks per mile in most other big cities. So if there is a meter on every block it's going to be much closer to you in Portland than elsewhere.
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
And why shouldn't parking generate revenue for the city? It's a limited public resource. Roads don't build themselves. Of all the money that goes into the city coffers charges for parking are probably some of the fairest. Much better that sales taxes, for example, and Chicago sales tax is already astronomical.
We have these types of parking meters, but every meter also has a number on a pole on top of it and you can park your car and pay by calling a number and entering the zone number. When you step into the car you call the number again to stop the meter. The system has been used in Amsterdam for several years, it is called 'Yellowbrick'. For me the greatest advantages is that I pay by the minute and don't need to carry a kg of coins with me, and I get a nice invoice in my e-mail every time I park, that's especially useful for business-related parking.
In my part of the world, namely Estonia, most parking can be done with a cellphone. Fire off an SMS with your car plates and the zone you are parking(usually clearly visible somewhere near by) in to start the parking, and you are free to walk off. When you return, you make a 2 second call to another number and your parking is complete. SMS will be sent to you detailing the cost of parking. You pay it with your phone bill. This system is in addition to the meter system similar to OP-s.
I wonder if part of the problem in America is our lack of violence toward obviously corrupt and harmful politicians? (Lawyers, too.) They should be in a constant state of fear.