Parking Meters Today

Finding information about Parking meters was hard enough, especially because with the new technology, there are many different kinds of meters and models. It wasn't so much the meter itself that interested me, but the jobs, financing and other technologies that had to do with paid public parking in general.I checked out a New York Times article that had to do with parking meters in their infancy, but that wasn't my focus, so I entered "parking meters" in the search field of the NY Times site and found a rather interesting article on the City of Chicago and their steps to privatize public parking, but brought the city something like $1.2 billion in revenue, which was a foundation of the City's budget, seeing as how it was such a large sum of money and Chicago, like everyone else is trying to refine their budget in the economic times. After I got useful information that article I began to look back in the search terms and found one more on San Francisco and the common theme among the various articles was that public parking was so much a part of large cities budgets, they probably couldn't do without it. Also, I found that these larger cities were all looking to somehow make the parking business more efficient through the use of technologies to make it easier for patrons to pay, easily find a spot and increase the turnover of parking spaces that were vital to a city's economy. I had never realized, living in Western New York, where the parking meter technology isn't exactly state of the art, how much effort was going into making the burden fall less onto the patrons and more into the hands of a municipality.

My next task was to find the different variations of public parking throughout the U.S. and even in other countries. On a whim, I did a Google search and came up with this website authored by a man who used to work for the Oklahoma City Parking Authority and was extremely interested in the different technologies and methods of controlling public parking. Unfortunately, the man died about ten years ago, but his site lives, with some useful information. For example, in the U.K handheld parking meters are used get information from the internet about people who had prepaid for a parking pass for a certain spot and knew the description of the car and the license plate number within a matter of seconds, so that no one else was allowed to take that prepaid spot. Also, the devices would allow the Parking Attendants to direct people to open spaces, also made available through a computer network. Also, in the UK as well as in America, people  can pay with any form of payment -cash, credit, debit. Also, the stations where one pays for parking are starting to be more centralized, eliminating the mechanical meters that most of us think of when we envision parking meters. The new feature of these centralized stations is a printed receipt that displays the time, date, and meter location, and how much time one has purchased, instead of a meter counting down the minutes.

Overall, I was surprised at how much information there was about parking meters and how important the revenue they generate is to city pocketbooks. The man from Oklahoma City, now deceased, really gave a nice summary, which I used as a starting point for my research. His efforts were not wasted when he made that site.