This may sound strange, but I’m nostalgic for parking meters. You know, the old kind that have an actual time-dial on the front and a slot for your coins. You find an unoccupied space for your car and then you go up to your meter in front and you put in your change. It’s so simple. The main downside was how often the meters were jammed or broken. In DC it’s always been a dicey proposition to park at a broken meter, even if you follow to the letter the procedure for phoning in the meter number and getting a broken-meter confirmation code: Good luck challenging that ticket if you get one. Your safest best has always been to move to another space if you can.
Now we’ve lost those silver-headed meters on poles. Instead we have tall green “pay stations.” You park, and get out of your car and wander halfway down the block looking for machine to take your money. Once you find it, you have to figure out how to pay it, get it to print out that little square of paper that shows the time by which you must vacate the space, and walk back to your car and stick that proof-of-purchase slip on your dashboard. It’s the payment part of the process that usually trips me up. Two-thirds of the time it rejects my credit card. I know my credit is good, because the stores never have any problem with the card; I guess I’m messing up one of the steps in the payment process. The pay stations don’t accept paper money, which is a shame, because it now costs two dollars to park for an hour, and I just can’t manage to maintain the quantity of quarters necessary to keep pace with my parking needs. By the way, this is not a complaint about the price of parking on our city streets: Seven and a half minutes for a quarter is pretty good buy, given that if you go into the nearest CVS with a quarter, you’d be lucky to find even a single piece of candy for that price. Most private lots in the neighborhood would run you between four and ten bucks an hour.
