The Trouble with Pay-Station and Pay-by-Phone Parking

As soon as DPW started pulling up the old parking meters and replacing them with "pay stations" that require the driver to walk up the block to buy time, I started worrying if people could get ticketed in the time it took them to return to their cars with the paid receipt. But it never occurred to me that this could happen, even with an individual meter, if you step 20 feet away to get out of the rain while you make a "pay-by-phone" cell phone call.  Here's the story from a very unhappy poster on the Chevy Chase Community Listserv.

I was at Dupont and was running late for an appointment. I was calling in my minutes on the parking meter, I was doing this from inside my car. I ended up hitting a wrong button on my phone and realized I was being transferred to a person...no biggie. As I said, I was running late, so I got out and went to stand by the building entrance because it was raining. No sooner did I reach the building and turn around did I see a ticket writer.

I tried repeatedly to call out to her...ma'am, ms, ms, as I'm making my way back to her (this was approx 20 feet). In that time she did not acknowledge me at all (mind, I'm still on the phone with the meter people). I finally reach the ticket writer and see why she didn't hear me: She had earphones on and was listening to her music obviously loud enough to not hear me approaching her yelling, "ma'am, ms". So, I reach her, tap her shoulder and tell her that I am
currently calling in the time. By this time the lady on the phone is with me. The ticket lady says she can't stop because she has already put the info in and I should not have left the side of my car. But it is raining, I said. A gentleman even stopped and saw the gross injustice here and looked at what she had put into her little machine and said 'you can wipe this out'. She was pretty rude and pulled her name tag up towards my face so I could get a better view.

I went ahead and paid for 90 minutes. [The poster ended with a long paragraph wondering whether it would be worthwhile to contest the $25 ticket, and concluded that she probably would just pay it.]

Still Life with Robin: Meter Meditations

Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parking meters  –Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965

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.

DC Parking Meters Go Solar

I guess it's progress when DC improves its parking meters. Much as we mutter bad words under our breath about parking in the District of Columbia, the following is also true:

1. We hate broken meters because they make us wonder, "Will I get a ticket anyway?"
2. We hate people who park at broken meters all day because they take away a space we might have parked in. (Partially contradicts item #1 above, but nobody ever said parking invoked rational thought.)
3. Parking is as bad or worse in other cities.

Here's the news: The DC Department of Transportation has begun installing 1,150 new solar-powered, single-space meters that accept credit cards as well as coins.

According to DDOT's director, Gabe Klein, "The new meters are also a piece of a comprehensive Intelligent Transportation System architecture that that will tie together all of our assets with adaptive controls that change dynamically, and provide real time information to the public, and DDOT. From our signal system, to the Circulator Bus, to the parking system, all proactively communicating.  Did we mention no more quarters?”