nothin Plastic Parking Is On The Way | New Haven Independent

Plastic Parking Is On The Way

Allan Appel Photo

Forgot to stuff a pound of quarters in your pocket before you drove downtown? Just in the nick of time for holiday shopping, New Haven parkers can use Visa or Mastercard for on-street spots as soon as next week as the city unveils a pilot program of 50 credit card-accepting meters.

It’s something city merchants and their customers have been clamoring for, according to Deputy Director of Transportation, Traffic & Parking James Travers.

He demonstrated one of the new meters in his office at 200 Orange St. Wednesday afternoon. The meters come complete with a solar-powered display.

Other features include software that will permit a regular computerized tally of who’s using the parking spots so staff won’t have to make periodic in-person counts; alerts as to when the machines are malfunctioning and how; an option to pay for parking keyed in from a cell phone while you sit cozy in your car; and the electronic capacity to alter, from computers in the department headquarters, the current $1.50 per hour to any new amount.

That latter feature will give the city the ability to institute a flexible process called dynamic parking” in the months and years ahead, should it choose to do so. Click here for an article on how that might work.

It’ll give us programming opportunities we don’t have. [And] we can control all from the back office,” Travers said.

That would include electronically writing No parking” on a meter if necessary to augment or replace papered or other signage.

Officials expect the meters, manufactured by the San Diego-based IPS Group Inc, to increase income.

Travers said that in Norwalk, where the company instituted the same free pilot of 50 meters over 90 days earlier this year, parking meter income increased 22 percent.

Travers said he consulting parking officials in 14 cities. They reported increases in income from 11 percent to 65 percent (in Washington, D.C.) with the IPS products.

Currently the city has 2,750 meters budgeted to generate $5.2 million a year. The transportation department has three and a half staffers to service them. That servicing includes flagging or fixing broken meters during the course of collections.

With the pay-through-plastic system, Travers said he could manage his crews better and they could spend more time repairing than collecting and counting. On the day a reporter visited, for example, the crew came into the office; counting $17,000 in coin occupied them for two and a half hours.

I love these [new] machines,” Travers exclaimed. He estimated that you would need to carry a pound of coins in your pocket to fill up the 12-hour meters at, for example, Union Station.

Last month, as the coverage on the city’s six-year-old all-mechanical meters began to come to a close, the city sent out a request for proposals for new meters. IPS will be one of several bidders.

In the interim, and of course as an inducement, its staff offered the free pilot, at no cost to the city.

Another option, is the parking station.” In that model Travers explained, one meter/kiosk serves every ten spots. You put in your coins or credit card, receive a receipt and place it on your dashboard. (The city experimented with an earlier version of those kiosks on Whitney Avenue years back.)

Parking stations will cost $10,000 per unit; the city would need fewer of them. IPS units, which use the current posts and base, cost half that, $495.

If all goes as planned, the pilot meters will be installed next week on Chapel between College and York and on Broadway between York and Tower Parkway.

The pilot meters will continue to accept coins, vouchers, and of course the Elm City I.D. card. There will be a minimum of a one-dollar credit card purchase because the city must pay fees, 13 cents on each transaction to MasterCard, Discover or Visa. The meters will not accept Amex, which charges more.

If the pilot works and IPS is the chosen vendor, the city will install some 700 to 800 of the new devices in the spring.

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