To educate the public. Courts in the City fo Asbury Park, NJ, have been flooded with parking tickets as the new Pay by Space equipment has been brought on line. People just don’t understand that now they have to pay for parking.
For the past few years, parking enforcement has been lax in the New Jersey resort town due to the fact that the meters have deteriorated and were not repaired. Now that new P by S equipment has been installed, the police are enforcing and tickets, by the hundreds, are being written.
Although we are taught that "ignorance of the law" is no excuse, in this case the city has gone out of its way to train the populace that they won’t be ticketed in pay parking zones throughout the area. Suddenly, the new equipment is in, and folks are expected to follow the rules.
The city’s solution — new, larger, signs.
Other cities have taken a different approach. First they put on a massive PR campaign about the new equipment. Then they assigned ambassadors to walk the streets, showing people how to use the new machines, then they blanketed the area with PR materials about the new system and finally, they have one "free pass" to folks who didn’t understand how to use the machines or simply were ignorant of the new system. Oh yes, the signs were legible, too.
I don’t know what happened in Asbury Park, but my guess is not all that. They spent nearly have a mil on the equipment, another few thousand on the PR campaign might have been well worth it.
JVH
