The Big Apple voted a few months ago (remember) to give a five minute grace period on parking meters. That is, if a meter goes into violation, then the enforcement officer must wait five minutes before writing the citation. Now they are putting this into effect and officers are being trained on how to do it.
Unfortunately the “journalist” who wrote the article in the AP didn’t think to ask just how the enforcement officer was supposed to handle this.
Let’s speculate.
The officer sees a meter and notes that it has just a few minutes left – So he/she does what? Waits until it clicks to “violation” and then starts a stopwatch? Five minutes later he writes a ticket. HMMMMM
Or plan B – The officer sees a meter in violation. How does he/she know when it went into violation? To be safe, he/she must wait at least five minutes from the moment he sees the meter until the ticket is written, right?
Ok – how about this senario – the officer writes the citation and the vehicle owner walks up. The owners says – “Hey, you can’t write that, the meter just turned to red.” The officers says “No, I have been standing here for five minutes and I know I hasn’t just turned to red.” He said/She said.
How about another problem. If the Officer must witness the five minutes, what’s happening during that time. Is he/she standing there observing the car and meter? Does he/she go away and tend to other business and then return five minutes later?
As correspondent Mark says – This is going to lead to chaos. Not only on the street, but in the courts. Talk about a law that is impossible to enforce.
Parking meter manufacturers have the ability to simply give people an extra five minutes. Buy and hour, get 65 minutes. How’s that for a solution?
The problem is that it just moves the goal posts. The “gotcha” ticket, that one given a split second after the meter goes red, is still there, even though the extra time is one the meter.
Once again, politicians trying to make everyone happy.
JVH
2 Responses
We can make our meters wait at 00:00 for 5 minutes (or any othe programmed amount of time) before the red “Expired” signal comes on. Another method is to show negative time on the meter before the red signal comes on, however sometimes people fail to see the negative sign and think there’s time left on the meter and come back to a ticket on the window.
What about if I park at a single space meter and I buy the minimum increment which is usually a quarter? Do I get a five minute grace period? Does my first quarter give me 12.5 minutes at a $2.00 meter? How is that going to be communicated to the comsumer? In Chicago where everything parking meter related is under a microscope by the media, there was a large hullabaloo when the meter rate jumped to $2.00 per hour. In addition to the shock and awe of the rate increase there was another unintended conssequence. Lacking the ability to display seconds and depending on the manufacturer and age of the meter, the mechanism displays 7 minutes or 8 minutes on either the first or second coin deposited. While an easy fix would have been to label the meters $0.50 for 15 minutes and although internally the meters calculated 7.5 minutes per quarter, the limitations of the meter display created mass confusion. There were charges leveled and a lawsuit filed of a “consumer rip-off” to the tune of 30 seconds of time at either end.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/1579503,aldermen-privatization-parking-meters-051809.article