Digital Payment Technologies to update pay-by-cell parking meters with RFID
posted December 5th 2005 12:45PM
In the latest blow to metermaids everywhere, Digital Payment Technologies will be adding RFID scanners to their
pay-by-cellphone parking meters starting in
February, moving the dreaded parking ticket closer to its proper place as a 20th Century relic. While cities such as
Los Angeles and San Francisco and colleges like UCSB have had cellphone parking for some time, it is the recent
deployment of RFID-enabled credit cards that has created sufficient demand for "swipable" parking meters. Now that
these high-tech meters know exactly where you are, and
can even tell when you leave, it's only a matter of time
before they start alerting your significant other that you weren't really working late on that project like you said
you were.
[Via Mobile Pipeline]
Umm.. I know that it must seem like we're this great big, frozen, homogenous lump up here, but this is a Vancouver company talking about a tech that seems to only have one semi-committed client, in California.
So the headline is a bit odd.
Goofy headline!
This has nothing to do with Canada other than it's a Canadian company that's making the meters.
It's actually cities in California that are thinking about implementing them.
Meters that are so user-friendly as to remind people to extend their meter-time won't be the technology-of-choice in cities (like Santa Monica, CA) which would lose a LOT of "income" from (very expensive) parking tickets.
Another version I heard of involves swiping the meter to turn it on, and swiping it to turn it off when you leave. I expect that version will be popular with cities like Santa Monica because they will hope people forget to swipe-off.
Wait, so you are telling me I can pay a parking meter here in San Francisco with my phone right now? I just tried to find info about this on Google, but no love.
To echo Jason's comment, where in San Francisco are these parking meters? I have never seen one or heard of them in use anywhere.