Parking

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th November, 1992

I see another watershed in the long running saga of Dunedin’s parking meters has been reached.

A few years ago our city’s traffic control tried to release us from the coin-in-the-slot approach to parking that had been the norm since the 1950s. Are you familiar with the parking coupons that required the driver to punch out the year, the month, the date, the hour and the minute? Did you ever experience one?

Those coupons were not user-friendly. For a start, on a windy day you wound up with punched out pieces scattered throughout the car. As if cleaning the car wasn’t awkward enough at the  best of times.

Then you had to hang the coupon in the window. This was when the wind really came into its own. Just as you got the thing stuck in place along came a gust, and with one phoof took off with it. Down the street went the cash coupon, and with it all the fiddly amount of time involved.

If shoving a coin in a meter was a 100 metre dash, sorting out a coupon was marathonic. And, if you were minus a watch and couldn’t remember the date, you’d had it.

The coupons went on sale in a large number of Dunedin stores. I’d say there are still vast unsold quantities of them lying in drawers or in the basements of shops; space-takers, and possibly even cashflow drainers.

Then the next stage in the saga arrived: we were to have coupons that changed colour as your/their time ran out. The APM, the automatic parking meter, was enthusiastically heralded as the saviour of meter persons.

That wasn’t to be their only claim to fame. They were supposed to bring to an end the sight of ugly meters cluttering up our streets. But what happened? They themselves died a quiet and unmemorable death, while the parking meters continued cannibalising coins by the tonne.

Streets without parking meters – who can imagine it? What a barren wilderness; how little upon which to hang one’s proverbial hat, or to lean one’s person and bike upon while chatting up a young lady outside the place of fitness. Parking-meterless streets – a wonder to behold. But not just yet.

Now comes stage three. Dunedin is to get the new improved computer approach to meters. We have to move with the times. Let’s hope these babies fare better than three expensive space-age meters Auckland tried out a couple of years ago – and found wanting.

The Auckland models were to be solar-powered – and all-knowing. They were supposed to be able to inform parking officers when a car took over time left on a meter which had been paid for by another driver. They were supposed to be able to tell the same officers how long a recalcitrant driver overstayed his welcome. And they were supposed to reject foreign objects.

They couldn’t, they couldn’t and they didn’t. The windows through which all this information should have appeared fogged up. The wide open mouth of the meter took on the status of a trash can and accepted anything put into it, including washers and foreign coins.

But Dunedin’s three thousand dollars a throw computer whizz kids come with the typical razzamatazz of all new gadgets. Not for them ignominious failure – after all, this isn’t Auckland.

What I like about the meter-maidettes (or traffic officer error-reducing automatons) is their ability to produce tickets faster. This means the human parking officers will have more time to chase people. (O frabjous day!) Instead of puttering around the streets on their little bikes, they’ll be whizzing.

Whizzing. Hopefully in their hour of speed they won’t themselves wind up on the receiving end of a ticket.

 

My comment about ‘stage three’ may be an error. I think it should have been ‘stage four.’

From what I can gather the new machines that were installed were the central ‘pay and display’ ticket machines. Instead of single-space meters beside every parking space, the machines were ‘central,’ meaning drivers had to find a machine and pay for a coupon which was then placed on their dashboard.

Most recently the City has installed ‘Pay by Plate’ machines: you enter your licence plate number directly into the machine or a mobile app, and no tickets are printed. In Oamaru, where I now live, a similar system was installed virtually overnight: one day we had an older system, the next new electronic machines were scattered around the streets. But to make sure motorists are kept on their toes, there are two or three different models. You can’t guarantee you can use each one in the same way (!)