Engineer Bijan Notghi of the city’s traffic department helped inaugurate a new era in downtown parking — and possibly the country — Thursday by installing one of 525 new meters that accept “smart cards.” Now you won’t have to fish for coins or mess with those pesky parking vouchers anymore. Read on to find out how it works.
By March, the city expects to have installed 2,400 of these new “smart” gizmos covering all metered downtown parking spaces.
New Haven is the first city experimenting with this system, developed by Parcxmart Techologies of New Hampshire.
You’ll still be able to use coins or vouchers under the new system. But the new smart cards are more convenient. It’s like buying books with a gift card at Barnes & Noble.
Here’s how it works: You buy a plastic card at one of 19 downtown locations like Atticus and Caffe Adulis or Caffe Bottega. (Click here to see the list of locations.) You can load it with up to $100 worth of credit. Then whenever you park downtown, you park next to one of these newfangled meters. You put your card in the meter. You punch in the amount of time you need to park. You pull out your card (and buy something with it at a nearby store, if you want).
The city’s parking garages also accept the cards.
Parcxmart has hired two “meter greeters,” including Edith Kufta (at left), to walk downtown streets to help people figure out the new system.
Once other cities start using the system, drivers can use New Haven-bought “smart cards” at meters there, too.
At the Temple Street event Thursday, Mayor John DeStefano said the change will save taxpayers $250,000 a year. That’s largely because the city will collect 90 cents on the dollar under this system, compared to 62 percent under the current system.
DeStefano riffed on the system being tried out here first by mentioning other New Haven “firsts.”
“I know it’s not as important as the frisbee or as tasty as the hamburger,” he said. “But it certainly is better than the blue laws, which were also invented in New Haven.”
