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The Parking Meter Turns 75 Today
nj_peeps writes "75 years ago Carl Magee filed a patent application for what would become one of the most hated inventions in history: the parking meter. From the article: 'Magee's brainwave was to install a device that had a coin acceptor and a dial to engage a timing mechanism. A visible pointer and flag indicated the expiration of the paid period, meaning you either had to move, put in more money, or face the wrath of the local constabulary. The design continued largely unchanged for more than 40 years.'"
The Parking Meter: Haunting humankind for 75 years.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
...F you buddy! I got a baseball bat with your name written all over it. Looks like you have 75 good swings headed your way, PUNK!
So, taxes pay for the roads, the sidewalks, etc. If you pay taxes, and you park where these fucking abominations are, then you get the pleasure of paying another tax on top of what you've already paid to park there.
That sounds great, doesn't it?
I'm assuming there was no vote when these things were put into play?
Sent from your iPad.
You really think it would make it easier to park in large cities for short errands if they didn't exist? Thank God someone actually thought enough to address the problem.
They won't accept pennies. 99% accept only coins. San Francisco is talking about 7 day a week
parking meter enforcement, Many at $3 per hour (or more?). And in San Francisco the
collection/enforcement departments spend more money than the meters take in! Net loss.
Captain: "Maliciously destroying municipal property while under the influence. What was that?"
Luke: "Cutting the heads off of parking meters, Captain."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In a bigger city near my home there are no parking meters. Instead, each parking spot int he business district is a '30 minutes only' (or sometimes only 15 minutes) between 7AM and 6PM. At least with meters you can pay more money and get to stay longer. In these spots all you can do is leave before Officer Cool (seriously that's his name) writes you a ticket.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Is parking for free an inalienable right now? Did I miss a recent update to the US/EU constitutions?
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Parking Meter is dying...
Cheaper operations and ones that produce more written tickets for violators are more productive.
Being replaced by 'buy a ticket for half-day or full day' or more modern digital ones that detect when a car moves from the spot so the next person doesn't get free time.
Let us not forget the 'Parking Meter Fairy' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKTFCdpBsAA
Although only to find out it is illegal to put coins in other peoples time slots, those things are nothing but a source for parking tickets and as we call the Ticket writers around here 'Vultures'.
Oklahoma City site of first parking meter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZQgPRFgkOA
How to Hack a Parking Meter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2CZ6yHJdBs
How to hack electronic parking gates
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BA37BmMgBc
How to Rip-off a Parking meter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOz7cdNaQ3c
Hi Tech Parking Meter, Los Angeles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y76VFJ0LoOU
Security easily defeated with a McDonald's straw. Or a reasonable facsimile of the official "out of order" bag they used to place over the broken ones.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The spandex inventor gets recognition.
The guy who invented the parking meter not so much.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/05/0513parking-meter-patent/ since http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/ is just an index and will change soon.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Why hate the meters? They are there to make parking easier and more reliable for everyone. It's the enforcement that pisses me off to no end. Writing a ticket for a meter one minute expired, or for not having a front license on your car (like it somehow creates a hazard?). And the pricing... Why should meters be $2/hr? Ever? Who carries that much loose change?
So, taxes pay for the roads, the sidewalks, etc. If you pay taxes, and you park where these fucking abominations are, then you get the pleasure of paying another tax
Do you use the same complaint against toll roads?
I'm assuming there was no vote when these things were put into play?
Imagine that you run a coffee shop. You want your customers to use the space in front of the shop while in the shop, and you don't want someone who works across the street to hog the space for 8 hours straight. So to keep the spaces open for customers, you restrict parking time to how long it takes to buy and consume coffee and a sandwich.
I really didn't care about them too much till they installed them in front of my house. Granted I lived downtown at the time, but it was a house, not an apartment. Thankfully there was a street within walking distance that had no meters at least till I moved away. There was this old guy in the neighborhood that would always walk the roads nearby with a bag of change after they installed them and refill people's meters. He used to just walk around and talk to the people who would be sitting on their front porch, but apparently he had enough disposable income to keep about 50 parking meters fresh all day.
And as nice and selfless as that was, that hurt the city income enough that they made a local ordinance against filling other people's meters. They even tried to ticket him more than once. Then they started chalk marking tires to see if they went past a certain time and ticketed them anyway. Just another reason I grew up to be the anti-tax, anti-government program person I am today.
Fuck you Carl Magee.
What would you do about the freeriders who come from out of town and park here? They don't pay any taxes in this town. And what about people who don't have any cars? Should they pay taxes for your parking place?
The best thing would be to get rid of all taxes and charge directly for every public service. Can't pay? Get a job! Or look for a charity organization that's willing to support you.
Downtown Portland Oregon got rid of their curbside parking meters. Used to be, you got out of your car and put in a quarter or a dime (or a nickel if you're an old fogey), twisted the little thingy and went on your way.
Now you get out of your car, lock the doors (this is Portland...), walk a half block to the ticket vendor machine, and go through the five discrete steps necessary to print a ticket. Assuming you're successful, you walk back to your car, unlock the door (this is Portland...) affix the ticket to your window with the sticky back, lock the door, and go on your way.
During rush hour, you may wait in line for a significant amount of time to get your ticket. Especially if the moron in front of you can not read directions, but I digress. Parenthetically, what happens if the meter maid happens by while you're in line for your ticket? I haven't had this experience yet.
When you get back to your car, peel off the ticket and throw it on the ground. Just kidding, you're supposed to hunt for a trash can, or throw it on the floor of your car along with the empty coffee cups and breakfast burrito wrappers, but looking at the gutters downtown it appears that a lot of people just drop them on the ground.
So we've replaced the purely mechanical, non-waste-producing (but generally hated) parking meter with an electronic, waste-producing, geographically distant, ticket vending machine that's even more hated.
Time marches on.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Get out your pipe cutter and celebrate.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I live and work in a busy downtown area. If there were no meters all spots would be taken by 8:00 a.m. and anybody coming downtown during the day to do business would be out of luck.
Parking meters don't just take in money, they help moderate the usage of the space.
74 years ago today a psychotic Norwegian Brown Rat coupled with an unknown venomous reptile released by a frightened owner into the New York City sewer system. Several months later the first Parking Cop slithered up out of a storm drain, and life has never been the same since for car drivers in various cities around the world.
The horrible new creature was able to subsist on little more than dung and rotting garbage, produced a new litter with every single case of copulation, and gets horny when abused.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
75 years? Must be time for them to retire!
sneers at your money grubbing parking meter.
In other news man eats 52 eggs.
Where I live(that mystical place called Canada), they figured out that it cost businesses more money if there were meters then 2hr free parking, along with 15min errand spots. When we switched from meters to non, business downtown went up by 40%, and so did the available tax revenue.
Check out an excellent book called "The High Cost of Free Parking":
http://www.google.ca/search?q=the+high+cost+of+free+parking
There are cities where 30% of the traffic in an area is simply people circling looking for a (free) parking spot.
...nothing better to lock your bike to.
In addition to meters that accept credit cards and cell phone payments, they have systems that can tell weather or not a particular space is occupied. If there's time left when you pull away, it resets to 0. If you're still there when time expires, it pages the meter reader with the location of your spot so they can come ticket you.
I'm perfectly OK with the principle of sharing that such meters are there to "help along".
What gets me is the abuse. London has plenty of it:
- when a meter is not working you're NOT allowed to park in some places. Yes, that's right, unless they can make money off it that space is going to stay empty!
- parking wardens do not have a formalised process for checking their watches, yet some of them use that to determine expiry. There is plenty of evidence that some don'^t even bother to wait for expiry
- I am personally grateful for not being there when my wife returned in time with the baby, put the baby in the back who threw up (babies do that occasionally). When she turned round from the clean up she found a ticket on the window. I think I may have lost it if I had seen that, I'm not quite sure how the person would have ended up, but I suspect some re-assembly may have been required.
- they count on the hassle factor to get away with illegally issued tickets: evidence exists from insiders that your first protest letter is not even read but simply answered with a standard template denying the incorrect issue.
- to make matters worse, London allows clampers, who have their own modus operandi for ensuring they earn well:
* only non-traceable forms of payment are accepted, and they are generally unreceipted. That's a license for abuse as well as tax evasion
* their staff generally uses up parking spaces in the area they patrol, thus increasing the chance of a violation.
* they rarely carry ID that allows correct identification of (a) staff identity as well as (b) authorisation to work that area. I actually got out of a car clamp because I asked them for it and threatened to take them to the local police station for impersonating operators (I can be very convincing, and they had nothing).
- last but not least we have the people that tow your car away. The original concept was to remove vehicles that were obstructions, these days it's simply an illegal way to increase the costs of a parking offence. I'm waiting for the first crooks that entertain themselves with loading up cars so marked, but drive them off for stripping instead of to the car pond.
I now live in a city where parking enforcement is actually reasonable. You'll get fined, but not the very second the counter goes to zero, there are blue zones where you can park for free for an hour (with a parking disc) or permanent if you're a resident (for which you need a permit). If you're dumb and forget your residence card, they wave your first fine (but not afterwards, they're not dumb :-). At night you only get a ticket if you're parked in a way that forms an obstruction to emergency traffic. If you need to park for a day you can buy a ticket for that too online. This is how it should be.
I'm also not very fond of shops implementing paid parking - if I go to spend my money there I should expect parking space to be part of the offering.
Insert
That'd be great except that you, as the coffee shop owner, do NOT own that road. That road belongs to the taxpayers.
And the taxpayers have decided through their representatives in city council that the owners of local small businesses have the entitlement to use the taxpayers' resources to deter people from parking like a dick. Small business owners pay good property tax money for this entitlement.
As did most of my neighbors, I got quite a thrill when the local miscreants escalated the war on the meters from coin slot jamming up to decapitations. Someone figured out a way to blow out the front of the coin slot with some explosive device, and I guess that was it. (I got over forty bucks in change off the sidewalks after a particularly spectacular night of destruction.) Now the People's Republic of Bezerkley has those computerised sensors with the central pay-stations, and all the spaces collect money, all the time; No more using free leftover minutes. I used to be able to find a space with a broken meter within one block of any place I went. Now I have to park like five or six blocks away from where I'm going.
Bummer dude.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
And, thanks to the technological advancements represented by the parking meter, just 25 short years later, to the day, we had the laser.