The new ones are supposed to be solar powered —
athensview: Goodbye to Some of That?
As I stroll past the offices of ACC Downtown Parking on this glorious first morning of October, I think to myself, hey, why don’t I ask about those slots in the parking meters? You know the slots I’m talking about? The slots for parking cards. Maybe I can pick up a parking card and avoid the hassle of looking through the van for change other than pennies. (The meters tolerate pennies, as you might recall from a previous post here, but not enough to give up any minutes for them.)
So I go inside and present myself at the window. A nice lady named Pam asks me how she might help. I inquire (That’s what you do when you’re talking through a circular hole in glass. You inquire.) about parking cards for the meters. It turns out there aren’t any. Never were. It’s a functionality that ACC never has exploited. Huh.
But Pam, and then Laura Miller, who is our Director of Downtown Parking, spring some news. (Or at least news to me.) Even as I write this, a company called Parkeon is manufacturing some “Pay and Display” machines — 16 of them — that will replace the parking meters downtown on Clayton and Broad. That’s right. The days of the meters are numbered. This whole thing could start going down before the end of the year, and maybe well before the end of the year.
Here’s how it will work. You’ll park in a downtown space on Clayton or Broad. You’ll go to one of these machines. You’ll pay for time — up to the two-hour limit — using cash or a credit card or a debit card. Then the machine will give you a receipt with your expiration time prominently displayed. You’ll put the receipt on your dash so the enforcement folks can see it. Voila.
Eventually, ACC hopes to replace all of the downtown parking meters with Parkeon machines.
I’m trying to think through all of the implications of this. One implication, it seems to me, is that the enforcement folks won’t need to mark tires with chalk anymore. So yet another Athens tradition soon may be swept away on the technology current of the new century.
We encountered some machines similar to what the new ones sound like in Spain. At first we were quite confused — which space was I in??? — but once we figured it out, all was well. I suppose the paper note for the dash is offset by the solar power?
