I also saw this story as I was perusing parknews.biz. Seems the city dads and moms in Brisbane in the land of OZ are giving the first 15 minutes at a parking meter for free. They were told that it was going to cost nearly $2mm. I have only one questions. How do you know?
How in the devil are they going to enforce this? The only way I can imagine is that they are using DCA’s parking sensor system. That way, the enforcement officer can know exactly how long a car has been there and can nail them as one local councilperson said “in the split second they go past 15 minutes.”
I can only see trouble on the horizon. This will fall under the heading of ‘no good dead goes unpunished.” I can just see when some Aussie Lad or Lassie shows up a split second after the 15 minutes and gets a $100 ticket. What’s next, 5 minutes grace on the 15 minutes free?
I really like variable rate meters. The first hour is really cheap say 50 cents. The second hour is $3. The third hour is $25. and so forth. Do away with citations altogether. This only works if you use a credit card meter combined with a sensor. The machine knows when you arrived, knows when you left, and nails your card for the total amount. No need for citations, the fee equals the citation. Just you watch. Its coming to a main street near you.
JVH
2 Responses
How do you make them pay with no enforcement?
The problem with variable rate meters is that people will figure out that if they come back out and re-feed the meter after the lower rate runs out, they can continue parking and bypass the higher rate while continuing to park in the same spot for an extended period of time, especially if you remove time limits. There isn’t any way to enforce this unless you do it in a pay by plate environment where the plate number is in valid after x amount of time. And then the parkers will simply watch out their window and run out to move into another space on the block to restart the time clock. Sound like a lot of trouble to go through? It is, but people do it in large numbers. Plus, since on-street parking is so scare, it only takes a few people to do this every day and you’ve clogged up the parking.