Certain parking meters to receive upgrades

The public will be able to pay for parking with credit or debit cards at about one-fourth of Oahu’s metered street spaces by sometime next month under the second phase of a pilot Smart Meters project by the city Department of Transportation Services.

About 1,060 of the 4,200 parking spaces under the city’s control will either convert or upgrade to the most advanced Smart Meters, acting DTS Director Mark Garrity said.

Smart Meters are a patented product of the IPS Group, a company with which the city has a contract. The latest Smart Meters have EMV chip credit card technology that is supposed to offer more protection from credit card fraud.

The conversion will take place in the city’s busiest stalls, those that charge a premium $1.50 an hour, Garrity said. Most of those are typically in Honolulu’s urban core, including downtown, Punchbowl and Waikiki, he said.

The city would take a loss if it were to convert meters that charge 75 cents an hour or less because the 75-cent-per-transaction fee it pays the vendor for credit and debit card payments could mean the city wouldn’t make any money, Garrity said.

The installations are scheduled to be completed in October.

The Smart Meter offers other options for the city such as motion sensors that would detect when a motorist has gone beyond the allowable time and is attempting to feed a machine, and then digitally decline to provide additional time. When the pilot project first began, the machines also allowed motorists to add time remotely by paying via cellphone.

The city chose not to continue with those features, Garrity said.

IPS won a five-year contract, through a competitive request for proposals process, to install the meters and administer the credit card payments. The contract runs through April 23, Garrity said.

The city is paying IPS $641 for each of the brand-new Smart Meters and $126 for the ones that need only to be retrofitted, he said.

Additionally, the city pays IPS $15 a month per machine for handling credit and debit card processing, which includes what the bank charges IPS.

The pilot program began in 2013 when the city installed Smart Meters at 333 of the city’s most heavily used stalls in the downtown-Chinatown area.

Garrity updated the City Council Transportation Committee about the new Smart Meters last week after Councilman Trevor Ozawa introduced Resolution 16-212, which calls on the administration to convert all of the city’s parking meters to Smart Meters, except for 10-cent-an-hour meters in the Salt Lake municipal parking lot.

Ozawa said drivers are more likely to feed their meters when they can use a credit card. Resolution 16-212 is slated for a final vote Wednesday.

City transportation officials are looking at other ways of making street parking more fair, equitable, accommodating and profitable, Garrity said.

“We want to think about, overall, how we manage our on-street parking,” he said. “So we’re likely to look at other options as well. You look at other cities, they do a much better job of managing their on-street parking.”

For instance, in Seattle, motorists pay for parking at pay stations placed on each block that dispense receipts that are to be displayed on vehicle dashboards, he said.

“It’s a much simpler system,” Garrity said. “And they charge more money for longer periods of time, so it generates more revenue for them. I think we could do a better job here of managing our parking resource.”