Electronic parking meters being installed across Los Angeles are expected to bring in an additional $18 million in revenue, it was reported.
"For more people it will be seamless–except they will get less time for the money," Bruce Gillman, a spokesman for the city's Department of Transportation, told the Daily News.
The city is updating its 40,000 parking meters, and 6,000 of them will be digital models that take coins and credit and debit cards. The extra $18 million they are expected to generate comes on top of $21 million the city already gets from meters, the newspaper reported. The citywide project should be finished in January. Some of the new meters have start of $1 minimum.
Some popular spots start at $4 per hour, the Daily News reported. Parking for free after 6 p.m. will be abolished, and motorists will pay until at least 8 p.m. If the technology lives up to its expectations, the city could replace the other 34,000 parking meters around the city. The 6,000 high-tech gizmos–costing $5.5 million–can send text messages to motorists' cell phones when they need more money.
Instead of leaving their lunch to get cold when they dash back to feed their meters, drivers can remotely pay them through their cell phones. Gillman said the high-tech meters are being evaluated for the next six months. Technicians have worked out bugs at the electronic meters from the weather and with the meter's main computer server, which accepts credit card information.
