D.C. parking meter complaints soar past 140,000
By: Michael Neibauer
Examiner Staff Writer
October 29, 2009
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| The nearly 142,000 parking meter-related calls to the D.C. Department of Transportation in fiscal 2009 walloped the previous year’s record total of 116,354. (Examiner file) |
» FY 2006: 67,813 » FY 2007: 94,049 » FY 2008: 116,354 » FY 2009: 142,000 Parking meter calls
Complaints about D.C.'s parking meters cracked the 140,000 mark in fiscal 2009, according to the D.C. Department of Transportation, as the agency's coin-fed meters continue to age into oblivion.
The nearly 142,000 meter-related calls walloped the previous year's record total of 116,354. The average for 2009: a staggering 389 grievances every day. No other area of DDOT responsibility, from street repair to traffic signals and trees, topped 10,000 complaints.
The total number of calls includes duplicate complaints about the same meter, John Lisle, DDOT spokesman, said in an e-mail. Some meters break down several times a day. Some even fix themselves, so that a person who parks at a "broken" meter returns two hours later to find a working meter and a parking ticket on their windshield.
Ward 1 D.C. Councilman Jim Graham, chairman of the transportation committee, on Wednesday said he understood that DDOT was replacing the so-called "Lazarus meters," or fixing them or making the public aware of them -- anything to reduce the number of complaints.
"Probably the best solution would be to replace them, and we are replacing them, but another option is to change the technology, to reorder the meters in a way to alert the public that this is happening," Graham said.
D.C.'s inventory includes roughly 16,000 single-space meters, of which about 12,000 are at least a decade old. Some 36 million coins are dropped into District meters every year.
Mayor Adrian Fenty and the D.C. Council this year doubled downtown parking meter rates to $2 an hour, and raised rates by 25 cents elsewhere. They also eliminated free parking on Saturdays.
But little of that additional revenue, an estimated $9 million a year, will be used to replace aging meters.
There is only $1 million in the agency's fiscal 2010 capital budget for major equipment purchases, Lisle said, and only a small percentage of that will be used to buy new meters.
DDOT, Lisle said, has an "active campaign" to replace aging equipment with new single-space meters, or multispace meters in high demand areas. Older meters are getting new main boards and coin track components, he said. And there are vague plans to try other technology, like pay-by-phone meters.
The number of old meters could be slashed by 21 percent in one year with a $1.5 million investment, DDOT officials told the council earlier this year.
