I hate to feed the meter and then leave with 20 minutes still left in the meter and see someone park in my spot as soon as I leave! On the other hand, I also hate to feed the meter and then realize I need to go back and feed it some more while I am in line at the grocery store or at the dentist. I hate dentists! ANYway, imagine a parking spot where you park and swipe the credit card in the meter for that spot. The meter will stop billing when you move out of the spot- this can be done using detectors embeded in the road, the kind we use for traffic lights. The concept of a parking ticket is gone with this approach. No more parking tickets...imagine that for one second...-- Sprokets, Apr 28 2005 Seattle (and I believe many other cities) has a new system where you pay by credit card or cash, and it prints out a sticker for you to put on your window. You can use this sticker throughout the city until your time runs out.
Your system does have the nice advantage of not having to guess how long you'll need parking. The only problem I can forsee is that a faulty sensor will bill your credit card for a whole day's use.-- Worldgineer, Apr 28 2005 The purpose of having a meter expire is to prevent you from tying up the space all day. That is why the maximum time is limited.
Some parking meters detect when a vehicle leaves the spot and immediately violate the spot so a fellow parker does not get your leftover time, but rather it goes to the city's coffers.-- haywardt, Apr 25 2012 When I first moved to Oz I was puzzled by a radio news report that the unionized staff of a local small town were going on strike over a dispute about who got to look after the town's coin collection. I thought they meant "who gets to sort and polish the collection of 1932 - 1938 shillings" and wondered why they couldn't just take turns or something.
But it turned out that the dispute was about the gathering in of coins from parking meters which was/is a surprisingly large endeavour. You can see the advantages of an automated credit card system. Sort of "if you can't play nicely and share the coin collection then I will take it away so NOBODY gets it."-- AusCan531, Apr 27 2012 random, halfbakery