That's theft of services. I pay for 1hr of time, then I have to go to the bank. If I can get back before my hour is up, it shouldn't be allowed to reset.

I'd never find be able to park in St. Louis if this happens.

*cough* b&stards!

Go ahead, take away one of the little joys of life. Nothing gives you a little lift like pulling into a space to find time on the meter.

Gig103:

I concur wholeheartedly.

Kanemano:

I also concur wholeheartedly.

Those dumb Bapsterds. Look where our tax money is going!

That is horrible.

Seems like an appropriate allotment of funds, what with all the loads of money they'll be saving by forcing those ne'er-do-wells who sneak in and steal that space with some time left and--*gasp*--don't expect to pay!

THEIR QUARTERS WILL BE OURS! OURS, I SAY!!!

*maniacal laughter, thunder clap*

I don't think parking meters are ugly.

/Is that weird?

Parking meters detract from independent businesses in busy parts of town. :(

That's teh lame.

I think somebody ought to walk by some of those $9000 parking meters and squirt a bottle of superglue into the coin slot. That oughta get their attention.

The world needs more parking meter terrorists.

omg, squeeze every last cent out of my pockets why don't you?

How is that "theft of services?" Parking without putting money in the meter is theft of services, isn't it? Not the other way around.

If you want to put the tech to real use, have meters with card slots and wifi uplinks. Swipe your card when you get out of your car and stay as long as you like. Your bank account will get deducted for the cost of your stay.

i love how many cities are working so hard to make life easier for METER MAIDS! these people are even lower on the "miserable bastard" scale than vice cops, and we're spending 10's of thousands of dollars to make their jobs so simple they'll be replaced by monkeys in a couple years. priorities, people. priorities.

Why can't I use time left by the car before me??? It's just not right.

At $9,000 I'm sure they pay for themselves in a week.

2005-06-30 06:35:14 PM Points_For_Effort

i love how many cities are working so hard to make life easier for METER MAIDS! these people are even lower on the "miserable bastard" scale than vice cops, and we're spending 10's of thousands of dollars to make their jobs so simple they'll be replaced by monkeys in a couple years. priorities, people. priorities.


What have you got against monkeys? Jerk! :)

Call Cool Hand Luke

Johnny_Canuck: At $9,000 I'm sure they pay for themselves in a week.

Doubt it. That's $54/hr 24/7.

And at a quarter an hour, operating at 9am to 9pm, Monday through Saturday, one of these babies will pay itself off, at best, in a little under a decade. At which point parking meters will be laser-toting robots, as that is how all technology is currently headed.

Senior American scientist says the "golden age" of bright ideas and technological invention is coming to an end (earlier fark post)

see, there are still some bright ideas left

The fair thing would be to refund us our unused time. Why can't they do that?

$9000 parking meter ... easily defeated by $2.98 worth of spray paint.

They really should give you money back if you use less time than you paid for. I mean, if I'm only going to be 5 minutes, but I'm required to buy time in 30 minute blocks, I'm getting ripped off for 25 minutes.

Not that they ever will. I mean, it's just like phone companies. If you've got a "plan" for 300 minutes, and you don't use them all, they don't give you any money back on it (although some of them will let you store the minutes for another month, or somesuch, which wouldn't really work for parking).

Quarter an hour? I don't know where you live, but a quarter gets you 15 min., maybe 20 most places.

In Seattle, the waste of public funds is so rampant that we've paid hundreds of millions of dollars for a monorail system that still hasn't seen any real progress in the 8 years that I've lived here. The parking issue in most parts of Seattle proper is nauseating, with many parking spaces zoned for permit parking only. This leads people to have to park in some sketchy places, and get tickets. I was once told by a meter maid fella that parking tickets and other nuisance tickets, like jaywalking were being enforced with reckless abandon since the city coffers were becoming more and more dependent on this kind of 'found' revenue. That's like buying a new porsche and being dependent on finding money on the sidewalk to pay for it.

Starting to hate Seattle.

Silly downtown shoppers and your Euro-trash boutiques, there's no parking meters at American owned Wal-Mart.

Wow, 25 cents an hour times 24 hours times 365 days equals $2,190 per year. So it'll take nearly 5 years for these meters to pay for themselves. And that's assuming the spaces are used 24 hours a day. But not taking into account the extra revenue that resetting the meters might make.

Unavailable for questioning:



...what with our failure to communicate, and all

/obvious

i HATE parking nazis!

/they need teh cockpunch

rbcp

25 cents an hour? That's cheap as hell!

The one thing i do like about the article is in the pretty picture below, there's a blurb about cops being able to scan plates at 30mph and cross-checking them agianst stolen cars database. that seems like a pretty worthwhile invention to me, the rest of it is crap though. serve and protect! not annoy and nickel n dime us to death!

tobyger14:

2005-06-30 06:41:59 PM tobyger14

Quarter an hour? I don't know where you live, but a quarter gets you 15 min., maybe 20 most places.

Half an hour -- downtown Huntsville, AL.

As a rule, costly technology that is the favorite delicacy of foreign-language-speaking aliens is illogical.

/Nostalgic

The meters are expected to pay for themselves by increasing citations.

Do they give me my farking change back?????

The money that parking meters raise isn't from the pocket change that's placed inside of it. Its from the little pieces of pink or yellow paper that they place under your windshield wiper when the red "expired" flag pops up.

As has been said, it's theft by the government, and someone should actually class action their collective asses.

I pay for 20 minutes, but use only 5. I personally wish the extra minutes to be used by the next guy, because that's the way I am. Because one day, I will need 5 minutes, and it will be there.

/pay it forward.
//$9000 is stupid. Multiply that out. And don't count on them being perfect all the time, so you STILL have to repair/replace them.
///There's an easy way to fix this: Make sure NOBODY in the city government gets reelected, and make sure the people who replace them understand why they got elected instead.
////Slashes are fun.
/////.....?

The Loaf
"The money that parking meters raise isn't from the pocket change that's placed inside of it. Its from the little pieces of pink or yellow paper that they place under your windshield wiper when the red "expired" flag pops up."

but THESE $9000 parking meters only reset the timer when you leave so the next shmuck has to chug in another quarter; hence the $.25 / hour comments

Only fair if they start issuing refunds for unused time.

tobyger14

Worst Case Scenario. In Chicago, 15 minutes for a quarter is common, but as you get further out from the Loop the rates drop significantly.

Monkey's Knuckle: The monorail tax is the reason I'm going to move out of seattle proper the next time I move.

We have a "30 dollar" flat fee for tab registration (which is all I pay, since my car is registered in a different county). In Seattle, they want to charge you 3% of your car's value to pay for a doomed-from-the-start monorail system. I'd have to pay almost 300 dollars to register my car. So I save 270 dollars a year by registering in another city. I can't wait to move to some place reasonable, like Renton.

mikeyb_houtex

//////PROFIT!!

In La Jolla, CA (just outside San Diego) there are meters that give you 2 hours for 25 cents.

what a waste of money

Knoxville actually has well-documented cases where their electronic meters will randomly zero-out. Well-documented meaning video evidence.

And guess what? Those meters still generate huge profits, because they will not accept evidence in the court room to disprove the credibility of their meters.

I went into a smallish coffee shop the same day I went in to fight my speeding ticket (which they slapped me with a bigger fine for 'wasting their time' when I said that they both got my name wrong on the ticket, and said I had a BLUE CAMERO (I have a red cavalier).) So anyway, I bought an hour of time on the meter. I walk out, and the meter maid is coming toward my car, writing a ticket up for the car right before me, and the other 4 cars down that line had tickets on their windshields. I spent less than half an hour in there.

I asked the meter maid why in the hell mine said zero after I put it in for an hour and she just told me that if I was still in that space when she got done with the ticket, I'd get a ticket too.

Parking meters = scam. They just need a system where you pay a low, low fee per minute of parking. That way they can only get 24 hours in one day, and you won't get nailed with a $400 fine and have your car auctioned off the same day.

But that's not the real issue, eh? Why don't they just ticket people for parking? No matter where/when they park?

Farkeologist: Swipe your card when you get out of your car and stay as long as you like
The whole point of meters is to force turnover at all the local stores. Park, buy stuff, move away for the next guy who can park and buy junk.

And to the rest of you folks: It's not the cost of the $9000 machine, it's the savings in salaries since you can now get away with fewer "meter marines" (yes they call themselves that in DC).

vermicin: I can't wait to move to some place reasonable, like Renton.

You know why they call it Renton?

Because nobody wants to buy it.

/Born in Renton

The meters do not increase citations. They don't cause the time to expire faster for the person parked there.

Why is everyone assuming $.25 per hour? Parking at prime spaces can cost $1.00 to $2.00 per hour or more. A lot of folks buy extra time "just in case" because it's cheaper than a ticket if your visit runs longer than expected.

Uh, hello submitter?
The $9000 meters are the "pay by space" meters in Montreal (10th paragraph, beside second pic, which is of said meter) and made by Parkeon.
The meters that reset to zero when a car leaves are mentioned in the last paragraph, used in Pacific Grove, CA, and are leased from Innovapark LLC. No word on how much they cost.