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Parking meter debit cards still bottled up
Friday, January 22, 1999 By Johnna A. Pro, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
For more than a year now, 750 electronic parking meters with slots that can accept pre-paid debit cards have lined streets in the Golden Triangle and some commercial neighborhoods.
The cards themselves are sitting in boxes at the Parking Authority's offices on the Boulevard of the Allies, Downtown.
Try to buy a debit card, though, and you can't.
If you want to park in Pittsburgh, you still have to feed the meters with quarters, or in some cases dimes and nickels.
"There are a whole series of questions around the electronics and the software that haven't been answered satisfactorily," said Ralph Horgan, executive director of the Parking Authority. "I was asked by the board to get these things up and running. But it was complicated enough that I wanted to make sure the system worked."
To do that, Horgan began a pilot study Nov. 19, the results of which are expected at the end of the month. The board will then have to decide whether to implement the parking system.
Under the proposed plan, a driver would buy a card from the authority - a $20 card, for example - to be used at the meters instead of pocket change.
When parking at a meter where the charge is 25 cents for 7 1/2 minutes and where the limit is one hour, a card user would insert the card in a slot on the meter. A screen on the meter would flash $20, then begin subtracting, in 25-cent increments, as much as $2 if the card user wants a full hour of parking.
As with coins, those who use their cards for up to the meter's limit but find they need more time will have to run back to the meter to buy more time or risk getting a ticket.
When the amount assigned to the card runs out, users can buy additional time.
"I'm looking forward to getting it back," Horgan said of the study.
The benefits would be numerous, said former Parking Authority Executive Director Guy Costa, who now heads the city's Department of General Services.
The cards would be easier for people to carry than change and, for business people, the fee for the cards could be tax-deductible.
"It's a good program. I'd love to see it work," Costa said.
The pilot project is being conducted in Shadyside at the electronic meters on Walnut, Bellefonte, Copeland and Ivy streets and South Aiken Avenue and at the authority's four metered lots that run from Bellefonte to Ivy streets.
Twenty participants were issued meter cards to use for the first two weeks of the month, although the study may be extended because the weather may have kept people from getting around as much as they normally would have.
The authority will be auditing the pilot program to make sure that the meters subtracted the correct amounts of money for the users and for the authority.
"I just didn't want to get this out there and not have it work," Horgan said. "There are ways that the parking authority can get ripped off. There are ways the customer can be ripped off."
The results of the pilot study and other recommendations on the meters and cards are due to be presented to the Parking Authority board at its next meeting Feb. 18. Board Chairman Gerald J. Voros said the report should include recommendations on where the cards would be sold, their cost and how they would be marketed.
"The big problem is that we wanted to make sure we were not in the situation where we were selling the cards and they didn't work," said Voros. "I would expect that in the next couple months we will launch the sale of the cards."
He brought the issue up at yesterday's Parking Authority board meeting because earlier in the week the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had questioned why the plan had not been implemented.
The authority's plan to sell the debit cards, at first in $20 increments, was to have started last January, but because of a combination of personnel changes and technical problems it didn't.
According to Costa, who left the authority in March, POM Inc., the supplier of the parking meters, was in the process of adjusting them to read the cards when the local representative quit.
At around the same time, authority members began to wonder if the debit cards could somehow be made to work in the authority's garages also, said Voros.
That delayed implementation a little longer.
Then Costa's departure left the authority without an executive director until May when Horgan took over.
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