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Doug Boadway on Monday checks the receipt he got from the parking meter stand to the time printed on the ticket and the exact, actual time. He found there was a difference in real time as to the time on the ticket. (NBC Chicago)
BY CAROL MARIN AND DON MOSELEY~Chicago Sun Times
Chicago’s new pay-and-display parking meters have a problem.
They’re not all in synch, according to a spot check of about 50 of the new parking pay kiosks that found the time they show varies from machine to machine.
They should all show the same time. They didn’t. And that could cost you.
City officials and a spokeswoman for Chicago Parking Meters LLC, which the city hired to take over the meters in a megadeal in February, say no one’s being shorted on parking time.
It would be “unfair to suggest . . . consumers are being given anything less than the time . . . they are entitled,” said company spokeswoman Avis LaVelle.
She said the pay boxes are synchronized to “assure timekeeping accuracy.”
But the Chicago Sun-Times / NBC5 survey found the time they showed was inaccurate by amounts varying from just a few seconds to about a minute.
That might not seem like much — unless you’re counting on your meter lasting till a certain time, only to get back by then and find it’s run out and you have a parking ticket.
Parking recently in the 2500 block of North Lincoln, Barry Shuman said he glanced at his cell phone to note the time — 11:45 a.m. Then, he looked at his parking receipt.
“Ticket comes out: The ticket says 11:43,” said Shuman.
If he hadn’t noticed, he said he might have come back when he thought his time would be up according to his cell phone and gotten a ticket.
Shuman’s view? “You are getting short two [minutes].”
“You got to know that people are getting tickets because of that one- to two-minute gap,” said “Mike, The Parking Ticket Geek,” a Chicago man who runs a Web site devoted to parking and ticket issues.
Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) shares that view — after getting a ticket himself recently.
“I thought I had extra time, and I was off by a couple of minutes,” said Waguespack, who was one of just five aldermen who voted against Mayor Daley’s controversial parking-meter privatization plan.
When he got back to his car, the time had expired — and he had a ticket.
LaVelle said the chances of meters being out of synch with the city’s central computer servers are minimal.
“Though the likelihood that a pay box might notably become ‘out of synch’ with the server is low, the clocks are synchronized nightly in an effort to mitigate this risk,” LaVelle said.
To minimize any problem, the parking system relies on an atomic clock, an extremely accurate timekeeper, said Ed Walsh, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Revenue.
“The server clock is an atomic clock, and the pay-and-displays synchronize with the server to verify the time,” Walsh said.
But he acknowledged: “Minor time fluctuations are to be expected.”
In fact, the Sun-Times/ NBC5 survey found that times didn’t match at pay-and-display parking boxes along Lincoln, Fullerton and Armitage avenues even though they’re on the same server.
The company that made the pay-and-display machines — Cale Parking Systems U.S.A. — didn’t respond to calls seeking comment.
By November, about 3,000 pay-and-display parking kiosks — at which drivers pay and get a receipt to show when their time runs out — are expected to be in place across the city, to replace 36,000 old-style parking meters.
The new parking system has drawn plenty of complaints — mostly about higher parking fees and malfunctions.
And now this.
“Wow,” real estate agent Doug Boadway said after putting in his quarters at a new meter in the 2600 block of North Lincoln and finding a two-minute difference in the time on his satellite-linked cell phone and the clock on the kiosk.
“That’s not fair,” Boadway said.
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