Ah, that most delightful of surprises: The parking meter with time already on it. If the City of Chicago has its way, (and let’s face it, they usually do) the gift of a partially full parking meter will a thing of the past.

They’re testing a new “coinless” parking meter system that would erase (not refund) any extra time left on a parking meter so the next person couldn’t “piggyback.”

The city sees this as “lost revenue.”

“We call it ‘piggybacking at the meter,'” said Bea Reyna-Hickey, the city’s revenue director, referring to drivers who benefit from the leftover parking time purchased by the motorists who used the spaces before them.

“Think of the countless thousands of dollars lost” every year at the city’s approximately 33,000 parking meters, she said.

Thousands of dollars lost because they couldn’t charge people twice for the same amount of time? The city should hush up and go sell another highway or bulldoze an airport in the middle of that night. That’s always fun.

ParkMagic? Not so much [Chicago Tribune via Wise Bread]
(Photo:josephp)

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