New parking stand
Originally uploaded by tbridge
You might’ve seen the new parking stands at the Courthouse parking lot, featuring space numbers, credit card machines, and time tags that you leave on your dashboard, but these machines are spreading rapidly. They showed up on Fairfax Drive near the new power substation recently, and are all marked with the “Coming Soon” text. The new boxes will transition all the meters on the street to 4 hour max meters. Many meters on the street are currently 12 hour meters, which means that they’re friendly to people who work in the surrounding area. Oh well, guess it’s just four hours for you, now!
I live and work in the District of Columbia. I write at We Love DC, a blog I helped start, I work at Technolutionary, a company I helped start, and I’m happy doing both. I enjoy watching baseball, cooking, and gardening. I grow a mean pepper, keep a clean scorebook, and wash the dishes when I’m done. Read Why I Love DC.
What I hate about these machines is that they offer no opportunity for ease of wealth transfer. At least with parking meters you might find one with some time left on it and be able to benefit, or else give that opportunity to someone else if you leave earlier than you paid for. With the new machines this becomes a lot harder and the spots can be paid for many times over while before the parking spot usage was based solely on time, instead of time and user.
I don’t like it.