NEW PARKING METERS DRAMATICALLY IMPROVE ACCOUNTABILITY
AND INCREASE REVENUE
The City of Hoboken announced today that the pilot implementation of multi-space meters along the east side of Washington Street has resulted in dramatically improved auditing capabilities for coin collections and shows a nearly 30 percent increase in revenue. The results of the eight week pilot implementation conclusively demonstrate that multi-space meters do exactly what they were promised to do by Transportation and Parking Director Ian Sacs; namely, improve accountability and increase revenue.
The new multi-space meters include real-time internal auditing, automated back-office reporting, and a coin box retrieval protocol that allows a match between a printed receipt from the machine and the deposit slip from the bank.
“Hoboken residents continue to pay the price for decades of corruption, but thanks to these strong accountability measures, the era of missing quarters is over,” said Mayor Dawn Zimmer.
"The audit receipts from the meters exactly match the bank deposit slips to the cent," said Director Sacs. "With the use of these machines, there will be no questions about collection and deposit methods in our City's metered parking zones. Nearly half of all transactions are cashless via new credit card capabilities, and we're also capturing more revenue previously lost to broken meters."
Some concerns about the new meters, such as speed of credit card transactions, display messages, and clarity of instruction cards, are currently being evaluated, and improvements to these concerns are underway. Last week, the unclear "Free Parking" message displayed overnight was replaced with "Free Parking 9pm to 9am", and the machines have all been retrofitted with faster modems to improve credit card transaction speeds. The Parking Utility is also currently developing more concise instruction cards.
The vendor contract was awarded earlier this year to Metric Parking via a competitive bid process that included two phases. The first pilot phase was intended to test the claims of the technology in Hoboken and evaluate whether a full implementation works for the City. In Phase I, the multi-space meters were gradually introduced along the eastern side of Washington Street in July and August, and collections receipts were compared to the traditional meters along the west side of the street. Additional revenue from the new technology has already covered the cost for two of the ten new machines. In coming months, the Parking Utility will be working with the vendor to identify other areas where replacing single-space meters with the new multi-space meters makes sense.
Link: http://www.hobokennj.org/news/new-parking-meters-dramatically-improve-accountability-and-increase-revenue/ ◦
