A modern meter system will go online within weeks in New York City, eliminating the need for drivers to put a receipt on the dashboard when parking. By getting rid of those receipts, the city will save roughly 2,500 miles of paper every year. But how does the new system work? NBC New York’s Andrew Siff reports.
The Department of Transportation on Wednesday kicked off the citywide rollout of upgraded, modern parking meters in Upper Manhattan, though it'll take through next year to get through all the boroughs.
The new meters, which you can now find at West 166th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, for starters, use a pay-by-plate system that allows drivers to input their license plates rather than require them to display a receipt in the window.
The rollout will take time. The meter upgrades will continue this year and next year, and extend to the rest of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island.
The new meters have multiple language options and the option for contactless tap and go credit card payments. They feature a large, full-color backlit display visible in all conditions that allows for easy payment and plate input.
Efficiency is the prime goal here, city officials say.
"This new technology will not only improve the user experience, but each year it will reduce maintenance costs and save enough paper to stretch from New York City to Los Angeles," DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a statement.
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According to her agency, parking meters issue about 8 miles of paper receipts daily. If all the receipts from every time drivers used a meter in NYC over the course of a year were attached end-to-end, it would stretch about 2,500 miles.
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Once fully installed across all 80,000 of the city’s metered parking spaces, drivers will input their license plate number and state into an on-street parking meter and complete the payment. The process aligns with the payment system already in place via the ParkNYC app -- the mobile payment application with over 1.8 million users.
As with the app, transactions from the meters are instantaneously synced with the NYPD parking enforcement systems so that traffic agents can use handheld enforcement devices to easily identify which drivers have paid.
The city says it’s serious about the "No need to display receipt" rule, promising it's exceedingly rare to get a ticket once drivers have activated the app.
It comes as a welcome change for some who never much cared for the system that involved paying at the meter, then going back to the car to display the paper slip — especially when the machines got glitchy and didn't cooperate. Some may remember a mini-meltdown in 2020 when nobody could print out receipts and the city had to fix a computer issue.
