Parking Magic

Did you ever find yourself facing the unappealing choice of either risking a ticket because you don’t have any change to feed a parking meter, or not being able to park and having to go somewhere else? How about those occasions when you need to be somewhere for a few hours and the only space available has a 30-minute limit, forcing you to keep running out to feed the meter? Well, if a new development going on in Chicago starts catching on in other cities, these problems may soon become a thing of the part – although I won’t make book on a new set of problems failing to appear soon thereafter…

According to a story being reported in the Chicago Tribune this week, the city has been testing an electronic parking system that allows you to purchase parking time electronically from a device mounted on your dashboard. Plans are already underway to expand the system and adopt new technologies that will allow you to purchase your parking minutes directly from your cell phone – and buy more minutes if you should find that your virtual meter is about to run out and you need more time to complete whatever errand you’re on. As usual, this idea has both positive and negative aspects…

On the one hand, feeding coinage into a parking meter is a pain, particularly when the amount you’re being charged for the space is as high as it is in parts of Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other large city. Consider that if parking is $2 per hour (not unusual these days) you will need 8 quarters per hour, or 64 of them (nearly two rolls of quarters) for a day at work. Even at 75 cents per hour I was spending $3 or $3.50 per day to park in Santa Monica the last time I worked there, which meant three rolls of quarters every two weeks – not a very appealing choice, but still preferable to the $175 that the parking lot under our office building would have charged me for a month of non-reserved parking. I’d probably have preferred an electronic system to taking $60 in quarters out of the bank each month…

On the downside, this system not only requires the user to have a higher level of technology available in order to park, it eliminates any practical considerations for not raising the cost of parking in the city. If your parking enforcement personnel no longer have to empty parking meters – or even walk a beat to write parking tickets – but can handle all of the functions of their jobs from a desk somewhere, not only is it much easier to enforce parking laws, it’s much easier to keep increasing the cost per hour. In fact, this would really require no effort at all…

In the long run, of course, it really doesn’t matter what we think of such developments; cities will continue raising parking rates because they need the money – and because they can. Eventually, the simple pole-mounted coin box will become obsolete, simply because it will not be possible for anyone to carry enough small change around with them to buy enough time for even a short errand, let alone a day at work. At that point a system that accepts credit cards, debit cards, and electronic payments by cell phone or over the Internet (for as long as there is any difference between those functions) is probably a good thing. A much more serious issue is that those electronic purchases can be traced – in fact, they have to be traced for billing purposes…

On-street parking will probably always be the low-cost alternative to expensive parking lots, and it may remain more convenient than having to drive off and find space in a lot somewhere. But the idea that one day soon anyone who wants to find out will be able to learn exactly where you park your car everyday has some very disturbing implications…