Comment "Smart" parking meter anecdotes (Score 1) 863
Toronto has had similar style parking meters for a while. Paying for parking by credit card is actually pretty convenient - when it works. When you're paying $8 for parking, hunting down change isn't much fun (even if we do use $1 and $2 coins)
The original meters that were installed simply validated that the credit card swiped was valid, and stored the payment internally. People soon caught on and started using prepaid credit cards that were maxed out to pay. I experienced this first hand one day when we were parking, and a guy walking by and said "don't waste your money" to me, walked up to the meter, swiped a card, and paid for our parking that night.
The company that created the parking meters responded by upgrading the meters to store a blacklist of 1000 numbers. The machines were occasionally updated with a new set of blacklisted credit card numbers. Eventually, there were more prepaid and maxed out credit cards going around the city, so they upgraded the machines again with a 10,000 number blacklist. This approach inevitability failed as well, as the blacklist grew too large.
The next step was to install a modem into each of the parking machines. When you attempted to pay with a credit card, the machine would say "dialling...", and they would contact a credit card validation service somewhere. Nine times out of ten, this credit card validation routine fails to connect to the validation service properly, and the machine refuses to accept payment.
Sigh....if only these machines were a little "smarter"