Anybody who has used the city’s credit card parking meters knows it can be a hit or miss proposition. What, the bank cannot be contacted? Are they at lunch or something? Now SDOT is acknowledging the problem that, the department says, has been happening for a week:
The city has told parking officers to be lenient and use their own judgment when giving tickets in those neighborhoods.
According to the City of Seattle, the cellular company that provides service to the pay stations has a weak signal. Therefore, the meter can’t always connect with the credit card company to approve a charge.
No notices have been put up on the meters. The city has known about the problem for a week.
Seattle’s pay stations are manufactured by Parkeon, a French company that dominates much of the global market in payment and ticketing solutions for parking and mass transit.
“The city has told parking officers to be lenient and use their own judgment when giving tickets in those neighborhoods.” I hope I am not the only one that see’s this as a real problem. Two parking officers in the Capitol Hill area come to mind when I read this 1. A lady who will wait til your time expires on peoples stickers and then ticket them. 2. A man who will kindly tell someone as they are parking “I think your a hair to close to the fire hydrant.” We need to learn to place principle over personality here. Its not the drivers fault the signal is weak and other places in the city the signal is working just fine. I think though it may be expensive it’s the cities issue to fix and parking officers shouldn’t be responsible for making the call. C’mon.
If the time on the parking sticker has expired, then the parking meter must have worked.
As for fire hydrants, it would help if the city painted the curb to indicate the corresponding no parking zone. Few of us carry measuring tapes with us. I note that some corner curbs are painted to show how far away one needs to park.
Be careful with corner curbs being painted. I was ticketed on one last year (14th and Harrison) and I had a picture of my car being behind the red painted line. The line was apparently not painted by the city and the magistrate indicated the city didn’t do that. I couldn’t even get the ticket reduced. However, I did notify the city and they came out and painted over the red paint with gray to cover it up.
In Seattle it’s the law. It’s about a car length or 5 paces. If you don’t know these things… wait for it… Bellevue!
I keep a roll of quarters in my car for this very reason.
I agree…the city should paint markings to distinguish the legal distance. This would help also with the “no parking within 30 ft” signs. I usually see people parked closer than 30 but still a good bit away from the sign. Mostly, they don’t get ticketed, but they could. This ambiguity is unnecessary.
Then we would hear a bunch of bitching about the city wasting money on paint. Save the conservatory would be the battle cry.
And then, once painted, we would hear the cries of the soulless suburbanization of Capitol Hill.
This has been going on for as long as there have been these new meters. I have repeatedly waited for five minutes, (often in the driving rain), while the meter takes its sweet time, and then either tells me the bank can’t be contacted, or there is ‘an error’. If you’ve got ten minutes to make your appointment after you park, and you spend eight of them going around to four different meters hoping that one of them will be online, there is something very wrong with the system…
This has happened since the paystations were first installed. The bargain-basement cellular plan that the city obviously chose pisses me off on a daily basis. These paystations are a study in frustrating the masses.
And, since our mayor obviously hates us, it would not surprise me if he suggested behind closed doors that available bandwidth be reduced, to further punish us for needing to drive.
Bandwidth has nothing to do with it. Credit card transactions require a miniscule amount of data.
Also, anyone who doesn’t have a car knows that most of our public transit system is pretty low-rent, too.
Be pissed off if it makes you feel better. Blaming it on the mayor not having enough bandwidth for the system if just plain ignorant.
Of course it’s ignorant, did you expect anything less?