Mount Kisco Parking Ticket – Overzealous and Blatantly Mistaken Parking Officer

18/03/2010

I’ve never liked Mount Kisco’s new machines that have replaced the traditional parking meters. But today, I was particularly annoyed. I went to Mount Kisco and parked my car. As the receipt to the left shows, I paid for my parking space at 10:54AM and I paid for 2 hours (that’s until 12:24PM). But, as the ticket to the right shows, at 11AM I was issued a parking violation for “Expired Parking Meter”. That’s a blatant oversight. Granted the ticket was issued only 6 minutes after I paid, but the parking officer should have a record of the exact payment time.  It’s not a big deal but I don’t even pick up my receipt all the time (I just happened to be lucky today).  I’ve included a scan of the receipt & ticket at the bottom of this post.

Just to give a little background, Mount Kisco recently replaced their parking meters (the ones by Cosi and Okinawa), with two centralized machines where you punch in your stall number, select a time, and pay.  It’s definitely not convenient for the people parking – it’s an extra walk and an extra delay.  But I suspect Mt Kisco installed the new machines for two reasons:

  1. Ease for the Parking Officer: It is more convenient for the parking officer to deal with two machines than numerous individual parking meters. Further since the machines are electronic, I’d assume there’s a device to see which spots have/have not been paid for.
  2. More Revenue: This is the more interesting point. Mount Kisco generates additional money. The old meters often failed, but more importantly the new machines don’t tell you if there’s time left for your spot. So let’s say a person paid for an extra hour on a typical meter.  The next person to occupy that spot would notice the extra time and [often] not have to pay anything.  But with the new machines, you have to enter your receipt number to add time and there’s no indication otherwise of the remaining time for a given spot. So if one person overpays, the next person still has to pay his fee.  This means Mount Kisco gets overpaid for a given spot.

Anyways, take a look at the receipt & ticket below (click on the image to see the enlarged copy):

Mount Kisco Parking Ticket

Or if you prefer, here’s the original (unannotated) image.

There is 1 comment in this article:

  1. 18/03/2010Venkat Koduru say:

    And I found the manufacturer of the new, extremely annoying, parking machines. It’s called the LUKE by Digital Payment Technologies: http://www.digitalpaytech.com/luke.html

    And here’s an article about Mount Kisco switching to these new LUKE machines: http://chappaqua.patch.com/articles/mount-kisco-to-replace-parking-meters-with-advanced-stations

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