One week later, meter now worse off by 2 hours and 1 minute

The office of Jim Kraft (Baltimore city councilman, District 1) called the parking authority, who in turn called me.  They both insisted the problem would be fixed ASAP.  The problem is now worse.  As of December 12, 2009 2 dollars buys you negative 1 minute of parking in front of Whole Foods. The meter shows 4:42 and my phone shows 6:43.  If you bought a 2 hour pass it would expire 1 minute ago.  How much did the city spend on these meters?  A writer at the examiner also agreed with me this is ridiculous.

I sent a letter to Jim Kraft's office again.  I am not upset about this one meter, I am upset with the  disfunction of our system.

If we are trying to encourage folks to move to the city and increase the tax payer base, little things like this are terribly corrosive to that effort.

I am sure the city paid a fortune for these meters.   Can't someone enforce the warranty on these meter system purchases?  Being a computer guy, I can promise this is a very basic fix in the meter software.
The clocks should be automatically updated daily when the credit card transactions are processed.

Baltimore Parking Problems - Broken Meters

I hate to admit it, but I had to drive today. It was too cold for the bike and I had too much to carry.

Baltimore parking is terrible. Our meters made by Cale Parking systems (link) have been broken for at least a month in the Harbor East Area. I bought this 2 hour parking pass on the left at 3:31pm today. The ticket reports I bought it at 1:21pm giving me only 10 minutes to park for 2 dollars.

This is not a way for Baltimore to encourage tourism or the patronage of our local businesses.

Fox did a report on this November 5th, one month ago here(link) and the problem still hasn't been fixed. I sent this to our city councilman Jim Kraft. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.

There is also a recent interesting WBAL (11-2-09) report here(link) about the problems and city council concern with the current parking authority.