In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania meter parking is free today because all of the city’s 170 meters are suffering from a glitch that prints the wrong date on receipts. Standard Parking, which operates the city’s meters, reported “global meter failure” occurred late Sunday night. According to pennlive.com, the technology problem has been fixed online, but the work on the ground will take some time to complete.
Parking officials are only writing residential tickets on Monday because every individual meter needs to be rebooted, said John Gass, an official with Trimont, the company that manages the parking system for the city.
It takes about 10 minutes to reboot a meter, the article says, so that’s around 28 man hours on the street. I don’t know how much the city will lose in revenues, but I’m sure it’s more than a few dollars.
It’s not a perfect world, at least, that’s what I tell myself when things that are out of my control start get annoying. The city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania might need a few comforting words when it tallies up the cost of a day without tickets.
On the bright side, what’s bad for the city’s bottom line is a happy little bonus for parkers.
Read the article here.
