St. John's few surviving parking meters won't take credit cards starting next week
Starting Aug. 28, if you're parking in downtown St. John's — at any meter that's still working, that is — make sure to bring coins, because credit cards will no longer work.
The city announced Monday that the vendor that processes credit card payments will be upgrading its cellular network.
"That would require us to upgrade our parking meters that we have in service that are accepting credit cards," St. John's Mayor Danny Breen told CBC.
As the city is currently planning to replace the meters it has now with a new strategy — including payment at a single kiosk for a stretch of street, or paying by phone, or through an online app — the city has opted not to upgrade the meters.
"The cost of upgrading the meters would be useless, considering that we're going to be replacing the meters, so it would be really a waste of money," he said.
Pay cards purchased from the city will still be usable, but how soon anyone will be able to use credit cards again is anyone's guess.
"That depends on how the rollout goes. We're still in the planning stage of that," said Breen. "We've begun with a test project, a trial project, on Harbour Drive with the PayByPhone parking. Now we're looking at other areas and what will be happening there. For example, we're looking at kiosks in certain areas as opposed to individual parking meters."
Coins losing their cachet
Breen said when the new parking strategy is in place, there will be a few options for payment, because not everyone will want to — or will be able to — download an app on their phone, for example.
"Whenever the changes are made, it has to have different options for people," he said.
"Not everybody's going to want to download the app, not everybody's going to want to use their credit card, not everybody's going to want to have a park card. So we're going to have to have multiple choices for people to use when parking downtown."
And while it's a good idea to make sure you've got coins on hand now, that won't be an option forever; the city does plan to phase out physical currency.
"Our ultimate goal is to get to cashless, but we're not sure how that will happen in the rollout," said the mayor.
The loss of the credit card option is the latest in a string of headaches for the city over the meters. In January 2014, the city replaced all its thousand or so parking meters with digital devices, at a cost of $474 a piece.
When they were installed, they were too high for some people to use. Today, they've become easy pickings for vandals and thieves.
"The damage that we've had to our parking meters is unprecedented … We needed to do something, and certainly replacing the meters wasn't an option."
Measly meters
Breen admits the meters have been frustrating.
"The costs have been significant. I think it's somewhere around a million and a half dollars this whole thing has cost the city," he said, through repairs as well as lost meter and ticket revenue.
"A lot of senseless acts of vandalism were involved in this. There have been arrests made, and those are before the courts. To have this happen to the parking meters has really been a shame, put a lot of unnecessary expense to the city."
Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador
With files from Mark Quinn.
