Here’s my column from the Sunday paper. If you’ve already read it elsewhere, please skip on down to the comments below. Thanks. 

Above: A new meter being tested at University and Hennepin in Minnneapolis.

TRYING OUT THE NEW GENERATION OF PARKING METERS

Minneapolis says its parking meters are “nearing the end of their useful lives,” and Roadguy has been muttering about their uselessness for at least the last few years. For starters, they don’t accept credit cards, and they sometimes find it amusing to shut themselves down and flash the word “FAIL” at you after you’ve dropped your money in.

But the next generation of parking-meter technology is arriving, and you can check some of it out right now on several blocks around town. The city is aiming to replace its 6,800 meters, so if you’ve ever passed up a great parking space because you didn’t have any quarters, now’s your chance to speak up.

The other day, I paid a visit to the “parking meter test area” on University Avenue in front of Surdyk’s in northeast Minneapolis. Instead of a meter at every space, this block has four pay stations. The kiosks take credit cards, and they have coin-return slots, so if one of them doesn’t like one of your perfectly good quarters, you actually have a chance of getting it back.

The meters serve about five spots each, so you might have to walk a bit, but the nice part is that you don’t have to go back to your car to put a receipt on your dashboard — the kiosk just remembers how much you paid, and the traffic enforcement folks can check up on everyone without visiting every car.

Your job is to remember your space’s number, which is posted on a little sign where the old meters used to be. The numbers are only visible from the street side, something Tim Drew of the public works department says will be fixed.

The test areas, which Drew said should all be up and running by the end of the week, have different meters from different vendors. A block in the Warehouse District is getting individual meters that take credit cards, while over on Washington Avenue near the University of Minnesota, the multi-car meters have the ability to tell you when it’s rush hour and parking is banned.

The meters will accept a new, not-yet-released, cheaper version of the parking-meter stored-value cards. (The one I bought this year for five bucks won’t work in the new meters.) Payment by cell phone may also be in the works.

There have been glitches. I received word early last week that credit cards weren’t working in the meters near Surdyk’s, for example. When I visited, my credit card worked fine, but the pay stations weren’t sharing information very well — one said that space No. 23 was all paid up, but another said the spot was expired.

That’s why the city is doing a half-year of tests, Drew says — to find out how the machines work in the real world, in real weather, and to see how users react, before a final vendor is chosen. So please do your part — if you wind up in one of the test areas (a list is at www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/parking), be sure to dial the city’s 311 information line to tell them how you feel. And be sure to tell Roadguy, too.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.