The city of Reading PA has done a study on a new parking system. It failed. Oh the system worked flawlessly, but the people didn’t use it. The concept was parking meters that have sensors in the street and could be updated by cell phone.
The city got a lot of data, found that people do a better job of paying for parking there in Reading than the rest of the country (77 vs 50%) but that not a single person used the feature that allowed them to add time to the meter.
As Mark says – is that a solution in search of a problem?
Oh, and I wonder at the 50% number. How could they possibly know. Without single space monitoring, it is virtually impossible to tell how much time is lost due to non payment. I wonder if the folks in Reading didn’t just pay more because the meter was new and jazzy and they wanted to use it out of curiosity? My understanding is that where these monitoring systems have been installed, the compliance number is considerably lower than 50%.
Read all about it here
JVH
