by Michael M. Gyrnbaum
Motorists’ bane, magnet for thieves, and memorialized in the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita,” the diminutive parking meter has led an outsize life. But its days in New York City are about to expire.
A garage in Maspeth, Queens, where workers prepare the latest Muni-Meters for installation on the streets.
The city will remove its last decommissioned single-space parking meter in Manhattan on Monday, transportation officials said, the start of a yearlong process that will eventually eliminate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city.
A few stragglers will still remain in Manhattan, in areas like the Upper West Side, but their brains will be removed and the inert pole repurposed for a new use: a bicycle rack.
A silent fixture of the streetscape that became an improbable icon of a car-choked metropolis, the Manhattan meter would have turned 60 on the day of its demise. The cause of death, officials said, was an acute case of obsolescence.
The old-fashioned, pole-mounted meter will now yield to the robotlike Meter of Tomorrow: a solar-powered box, equipped with Wi-Fi, that can handle eight parking spaces at once and can shut itself down on free-parking Sundays.
The city’s Transportation Department, which recently accelerated its meter retirement program, says the change will benefit city and citizen alike: the new meters read credit cards, speak seven languages, require less maintenance, and free up room on the sidewalk.
But the death of the classic meter also means an end to some of New York’s smaller pleasures: the satisfying clunk of a coin in its slot, the illicit thrill of finding an extra few minutes still counting down.
“We’re losing the driver’s version of a lottery ticket,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic engineer and transportation commissioner.
Read more:
image: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Motorists’ bane, magnet for thieves, and memorialized in the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita,” the diminutive parking meter has led an outsize life. But its days in New York City are about to expire.
A garage in Maspeth, Queens, where workers prepare the latest Muni-Meters for installation on the streets.
The city will remove its last decommissioned single-space parking meter in Manhattan on Monday, transportation officials said, the start of a yearlong process that will eventually eliminate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city. A few stragglers will still remain in Manhattan, in areas like the Upper West Side, but their brains will be removed and the inert pole repurposed for a new use: a bicycle rack.
A silent fixture of the streetscape that became an improbable icon of a car-choked metropolis, the Manhattan meter would have turned 60 on the day of its demise. The cause of death, officials said, was an acute case of obsolescence.
The old-fashioned, pole-mounted meter will now yield to the robotlike Meter of Tomorrow: a solar-powered box, equipped with Wi-Fi, that can handle eight parking spaces at once and can shut itself down on free-parking Sundays.
The city’s Transportation Department, which recently accelerated its meter retirement program, says the change will benefit city and citizen alike: the new meters read credit cards, speak seven languages, require less maintenance, and free up room on the sidewalk.
But the death of the classic meter also means an end to some of New York’s smaller pleasures: the satisfying clunk of a coin in its slot, the illicit thrill of finding an extra few minutes still counting down.
“We’re losing the driver’s version of a lottery ticket,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic engineer and transportation commissioner.
Read more:
image: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
