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Meeting Meter Number 2
I have bone to pick. With a parking meter. In particular, with meter number 2 in the Market Lane parking lot in Picton. The meters are a recent addition to what used to be free parking space, but I’m not denying the County the right to charge for parking.
What I’m upset about is the fact that meter number 2 has not been playing by the rules. The other day, I had a couple of errands to run in Picton, so I elected to pay for an hour’s parking. Sounds straightforward, right? Not so. The time at which I was parking was 2:01 p.m. (I know that because the news had just started on my car radio, and both my watch, my wife’s watch and the car clock said it was 2:01); yet the meter told me I was buying my ticket at 1:41, so it gave me an expiry time of 2:41. It therefore gave me parking permission for only 40 minutes instead of the 60 minutes I had duly paid for. I had sinister visions of a bylaw enforcement officer standing around the corner waiting to take advantage of the fact that I might have gone away thinking I had a full hour to play with.
And there was a secondary problem. As prompted by the machine, I deposited a loonie to pay for the hour, but the receipt told me I had paid 50 cents—in the form of a 50-cent coin, whatever that is. But if I had paid only 50 cents, the meter should have given me parking until 2:31 (on my watch) or 2:11 (on its watch).
This made my blood boil. I don’t imagine it takes an advanced degree in artificial intelligence to program a parking meter to tell the right time and recognize the right coinage. And what’s so wrong about demanding precision in our parking meters? We wouldn’t tolerate our traffic lights at the five corners in Picton being out of whack by even 20 seconds, never mind 20 minutes: chaos would ensue. Same thing with the Wellington traffic light: although we might not notice the 20 seconds, we wouldn’t tolerate that one being out of whack for more than 20 minutes.
(That’s the annoying thing about machines: you can’t get a reaction out of them. They should come equipped with an appropriately sized punching bag, to ensure that users don’t suffer bone damage while expressing their exasperation by hitting metal.)
So I did my civic duty, and reported the problem. I would love to be able to tell you that I was met with an unending circle of voicemail messages and bureaucratic inaction. Sadly, this was not so. The operator at Shire Hall took my inquiry seriously and referred me to the bylaw department. An officer there gave me a call back in 10 minutes with a cheery assurance that the problem would be looked into and a thank you for drawing the problem to her attention.
And I must, again sadly, reject the theory that the faulty parking meter is just the tip of a vast conspiracy to raise municipal funds by stealth. By my calculation, it would take some 89.7 years to retire our municipal debt using the extra revenue from the unwitting users of meter number 2. By that time, some other curious soul would surely have twigged to the scam, or someone within the inner circle of the conspiracy would have cracked under the strain of keeping the secret.
Besides, if the meter were deliberately rigged and the news ever came out, all hell would break loose. People would start ignoring all meters and judges would refuse to levy parking fines. People would wonder whether their municipal tax bills were gamed a little, and put off paying. Wineries would start opening in Havelock rather than Hillier. Bachelorette parties would migrate to Deseronto. The local economy would collapse. The County would take on a new incarnation as a redoubt for survivalists who rejected all forms of government authority.
On the brighter side, housing would become affordable (if only by virtue of being unsellable); thereby achieving one of our local policy objectives.
No, it doesn’t hold water. No Kafkaesque bureaucracy. No vast conspiracy. Just a single faulty machine. Too bad; it would have made a great story. The only story here is what could have been such important “errands” that I would choose to spend an hour in Picton on a hot summer afternoon; and I’m not telling.
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