Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

The Globe says the average meter needs repair 4 times a month, or 36/year. (Apparently meters near valet parkers require repair 10 times per month.)

I used to have an office overlooking a small city parking lot, maybe 75 meters. The parking lot had its rhythms, full around noon, steady traffic the rest of the day. Parking Enforcement trolled hourly, couple of times a month a guy collected the coins.

Broken meters generally stayed broken for days to weeks. Spotting them was kind of a game -- why does that meter *always* have an occupant?

Based on my parking lot, the Globe's numbers are off by a couple of orders of magnitude. 4 repairs times 75 meters is 300 maintenance sorties a month. I never saw a parking meter being fixed or replaced over a span of several years. Based on the number of broken meters that eventually got fixed I'd put the number of faerie visits closer to 3 a month for the entire lot.

( This parking lot is in the center of the continent, on the whole a harsher environment than Boston. To the extent nature is a factor in meter failure our observations should be similar. Is meter vandalism a popular pastime in Beantown? )

Maybe they are simply counting "how often they need repair". In other words, nobody is fixing the meters. So they get count multiple times. The more often they check, the more often they need repair.

If it's 4 times a month, doesn't that make it 48 times/year?

Yeah, the Globe numbers seem way off. But that's what The Globe reported.

As for what 4 times 12 equals, well, we may never know for sure.

i was a valet in downtown boston. broken meters are broken by inserting paper("jamming meters" in the coinslot. To fix them BTD has to only turn a key to open the meter, then remove the foreign object. It is hardly noticable.