Broken meter? How rare, says City Hall

If parking meters are broken, why should drivers pay the price? That's the question tipster Peter Wilson of Cambridge raises over what he sees as the city's mismanagement of malfunctioning street meters and its policy of allowing only one hour of free parking when meters are down, instead of the two-hour paid maximum.

Wilson recalls a few years ago, there was a constant rash of broken meters on Commonwealth Avenue between Massachusetts Avenue and the Fenway area where he used to park for dental visits.

"My appointments at my old dentist in the Back Bay lasted on average an hour and 15 minutes," writes Wilson in an e-mail. "There are usually many available two-hour meters in the middle of the day, but at times as many as half of the meters are out of order," he says. "I remember going down the block and counting broken meters - it was at least half of the meters. The rule posted on the meter is that you can only park for one hour if the meter is broken, so the empty spaces did me no good. If the city can't bother to fix their parking meters, I don't see why I should be penalized.

"I now have a new dentist in Brookline, where I can park on the street for free - just not overnight, and so far none of my dentist appointments have lasted that long," says Wilson.

A visit to the stretch of Comm. Ave. by a Globe reporter last week found only a single broken meter. But GlobeWatch wondered how often meters were really out of service across the city, how quickly they were repaired, and if fancy new meters on Newbury Street that take credit cards, dollar bills, and coins might help minimize the one-hour/broken meter syndrome.

Despite their old-fashioned look, the city just completed replacing the inner mechanisms in all 6,159 single-space meters last week, said Thomas Tinlin, commissioner of the Boston Transportation Department. The new workings will make the meters "a little harder to put out of order," said James Mansfield, a department spokesman.

The vast majority of broken meters - nearly 98 percent - are the result of people damaging them to avoid paying meter fees and side-stepping a ticket for an expired meter, he said. Though maintenance crews follow regular routes to inspect meters, enforcement officers and collection agents visit meters every day and often report broken ones.

Once identified, there's about a 24-hour turnaround for most repairs, said Tinlin. The city is considering taking out some of the coin-operated single-space meters and installing multi-space meters like those on Newbury and Boylston streets and the Back Bay cross streets between them, said Mansfield, but that idea is still in the early planning stages. The city now has about 60 such meters in operation, including 30 that were installed in the Charlestown Navy Yard last November that are "much improved" in terms of breakdowns, said Tinlin. But they are expensive and require extra sidewalk space, so they may not work in every district that wants them, said Mansfield.

WHO'S IN CHARGE
Thomas J. Tinlin
Commissioner
Boston Transportation Department
1 City Hall Square, Room 721
Boston, MA 02201-2026
617-635-4680