Smart Meters: What are they?

[Metro Jacksonville]

Smart Meters: What are they?



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http://www.metrojacksonville.com/content/view/278

[lindab]

 Just paid a $15 ticket because I ran out of quarters when I went to the City Planning Dept.
Looking forward to something different.  Here's a story on the last NYC mechanical meter.
 
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December 20, 2006
New York Retires Last Mechanical Parking Meter
By SEWELL CHAN
The last New York City mechanical parking meter â€" an emblem of street life, an object of motorist frustration and endless source of fascination for city children since 1951 â€" was withdrawn from service at 10:25 a.m. today.

The demise of the mechanical meter was painless but not swift. Since 1995, when the city first tested battery-powered digital meters and quickly found them to be more accurate, reliable and vandal-proof than the older spring-loaded devices, the days of the mechanical meter have been numbered.

By the start of this year, the mechanical models made up only 2,000 of the 62,000 single-space meters in the city. This morning, in a somber but unpretentious ceremony on the southwest corner of West 10th Street and Surf Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the very last one was retired.

Fifteen officials from the Parking Operations Bureau of the City Department of Transportation came to watch as the last mechanical meter was removed from its iron casing and replaced with a digital one. (The new and old meters both fit the same casing.)

“The world changes,” said Iris Weinshall, the city’s transportation commissioner. “Just as the token went, now the manual meter has gone.”

Ms. Weinshall admitted to some pangs of nostalgia. “A lot of our employees feel very connected to these meters. This type of meter will go into museums, just like other memorabilia of the city.”

Ms. Weinshall, who is 53, recalled that as a child in Midwood, Brooklyn, her father, a cabdriver, would use his yellow cab to run errands on weekends. “Whenever my father would park, it was really a thrill to put the coin in the meter and turn that little handle,” she said. “It was fun. Usually you saw only grown-ups do it; this was something you could do.”

Victor Rosen, the assistant commissioner for parking operations, enumerated the advantages of the new technology.

“The new digital meters guarantee true time, every time, because they’re a digital clock in essence so you never get shorted time, as could happen with the old mechanical meter,” he said. “Secondly, these meters are very vandal-resistant because there’s no handle to turn or be broken off. You just insert your coin and get the time on a clear display.” He said the digital meters are also much more effective than their manual predecessors at detecting fake or foreign coins.

The first parking meter, invented by a fellow named Carl C. Magee, was introduced in Oklahoma City in 1935.

After a trial run, the meters were introduced in New York City on Sept. 19, 1951, as a way of easing traffic congestion (and raising municipal revenue). The boxer Sugar Ray Robinson expressed skepticism about the devices as city officials dropped a dime into the first meter, on 125th Street in Harlem.

The city’s last 10-cent meters were converted to accept only quarters in 1986. A decade later, in 1996, the city introduced theft-resistant meters with sealed coin canisters and multispace meters, called Muni-Meters, that accept parking cards. Many of the Muni-Meters now accept debit and credit cards as well, and last year, in an experiment, the city configured some single-space meters to accept parking cards.

However, officials said they had no plans to do away with either single-space meters or coins â€" because they are convenient.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

   

[Jerome Howard]

Neat idea!