another government rant
SF sells prepaid debit cards you stick in a parking meter and pay that way. It’s a great idea, but hard to find a place that sells them. I got out of the truck downtown and didn’t even have a dime. Big deal, a dime is worth two minutes time. I wanted to shake awake the homeless guy under the blankets and ask for some change, but it’s best to let sleeping vets lie.
Department of Parking and Traffic, or DPT, is located a few blocks from my truck so I head there to buy a card. Of course, I wait in line and tell a woman seated behind a bullet proof window what I need. She gives me a number. H164. They are calling B281. What a terrible system. I’ll be sure to have a ticket if I wait in this line. At $55 a pop, you can’t afford to be patient.
My apologies for not making a very interesting blog post for you folks tonite. I’m gong to bed early to sell at the flea market tomorrow.
That’s a lame system, for sure. Lots of areas in Milwaukee are using the system where you park your car in a numbered spot and walk over to an ATM-like machine to pay by cash or card. You type in your spot number and it tells you how much time is left from the previous payer, then you pay the remainder for what you need.
It’s a pretty good system. The government could make it even more profitable if it forced you to provide a previous receipt to re-up your parking time. In this way, new parkers couldn’t take advantage of the previous parker’s remaining time and the gov’t could double up on parking revenues in that scenario.
Comment by Lyle_S — January 23, 2011 @ 10:24 am
i stuck my credit card in one the other day. don’t all of the meters have credit card slots too?
Comment by donno — January 24, 2011 @ 8:54 am
That’s makes sense, doesn’t it donno, that Rolston would be the dumb-ass and not the govt?
Comment by Lyle_S — January 24, 2011 @ 10:43 am
Calm down, calm down. There are new chrome/aluminum meters that can read a credit card, but the old ones with the yellow top to indicate commercial truck loading zones dont have a touch screen to enter PIN or amount, etc. It just reads the balance on the prepaid card and sucks out money till you remove it from the meter.
Comment by Rolston — January 24, 2011 @ 9:07 pm
It’s still a crappy system. Why not eliminate all the meters and have one terminal for payment every block or two? Milwaukee rules!
Comment by Lyle_S — January 26, 2011 @ 11:52 am