When Smart Parking Meters Become Overly Sensitive
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“It’s not a huge issue, but it’s a small irritating one,” according to San Jose’s transportation department.
The city of San Jose is working with the manufacturer of its “smart” parking meters to correct a glitch that has left dozens of people stuck with citations they didn’t deserve.
According to the San Jose Department of Transportation, the problem is not widespread. But about 15 of the city’s 1,200 smart meters were prone to resetting the paid time they had remaining to zero when trucks or other heavy vehicles passed by.
So a person who had paid for enough time to park might have returned to their car only to discover they’d been slapped with a $40 ticket.
“The problem boils down to this: the sensors were overly sensitive,” Steven Brewster, a department spokesman said in an interview on Tuesday. He added that all of the malfunctioning meters are located near construction sites and bus stops.
“It’s not a huge issue, but it’s a small irritating one,” he said. “We’re really sorry that citations got issued in error.”
The trouble with the meters was reported in the San Jose Mercury News late last week.
The smart meters that San Jose uses accepts coin, credit card and phone payments. They rely on puck-like sensors embedded in the street pavement that detect when a car leaves a spot. When the vehicle pulls away the meter resets, meaning the next person doesn’t get any leftover time.
San Diego-based IPS Group, Inc. manufactures the meter technology San Jose uses. Cities across the country have installed the company’s meters during recent years.
Multiple messages left with IPS went unreturned.
San Jose is not the only place where the company’s products have acted finicky. Walnut Creek, California, experienced similar troubles last year. But Matt Huffaker, assistant to the city manager in that Bay Area city, said re-calibrating the sensors to be less sensitive remedied the issue.
“It’s eliminated those false resets,” Huffaker said on Tuesday. The adjustment did not require any equipment to be replaced, he said.
Huffaker noted that Walnut Creek handles about 3 million parking meter transactions per year and that overall the city has been pleased with the way IPS’s technology has performed.
The city of York, Pennsylvania, put about 200 IPS meters in place last year and has not had any major problems, according to York’s deputy business administrator, Cheryl Rascoe.
“We haven’t had that issue,” she said on Monday, when asked if the city had experienced any difficulties with the meters resetting.
As for San Jose, Brewster said the city plans to work with IPS to find a solution to the twitchy sensors. The fix might involve re-calibration, or re-installation, he said.
For the time being, the city has disabled the reset function. This means that the time a person leaves on a meter when they pull away from a spot will remain available to the next parker.
San Jose’s transportation department has known about their meter problem for about three months. But, Brewster said, it wasn’t until the Mercury News reported on the issue that the city publicly announced that it would waive unwarranted citations tied to the meters. Before then, the city did dismiss some tickets known to have been issued in error, he said.
The city estimates the number of parking tickets issued due to the malfunctioning meters has been about 30 per month.
San Jose has a total of 2,628 parking meters, according to the city’s adopted 2014-2015 operating budget. It finished the installation of the 1,200 smart meters in 2014.
During the 2014-2015 budget cycle, the city’s meters were expected to feed about $3.4 million into a general purpose parking fund. The fund covers parking operations and capital expenses related to both lots and meters and had a total adopted level of $32,003,275.
The budget also forecast that San Jose would issue about 218,000 parking citations during the 2014-2015 cycle.
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