By Chris Cassidy
SALEM — The city's new parking meters will soon be a lot smarter.
For starters, they'll accept coins, dollar bills, MasterCard and Visa. They'll feature a screen where customers can prepay for their specific parking space and automatically get a time-stamped receipt. And they'll run on solar power and use modems to transmit information.
"Once it gets up and running, the convenience to our customers will be greater," Parking Director Jim Hacker said.
Of course, "smart" has its disadvantages, particularly for those who run over time on their meters.
The city's parking enforcers will now carry an electronic device that receives information from the meters themselves and can report which spaces have expired. Parking officials say the device will save time because they'll no longer have to walk through each row, checking each meter.
So it just got a little harder to squeeze a few minutes out of that expired meter.
The meters will soon be installed at the gated Church Street lot and the city-owned section of the MBTA lot off Bridge Street.
Already, the Parking Department has installed poles with signs displaying parking space numbers. Drivers will park, take note of the parking space number, then walk to one of the five meters in the Church Street lot (two in the MBTA lot) and pay for their space.
Hacker said the rates will remain the same: $1.50 per hour in the gated Church Street lot and $2 per day in the MBTA lot.
With the meters in place, the collection booth at the Church Street lot will be dismantled and the one full-time and "three or four" part-time employees will be reassigned to other jobs within the department, Hacker said.
Hacker hopes the meters — which cost $13,000 each — will be up and running by the end of the month.
Other cities, including Lowell and Boston, have already adopted the new technology.
The traditional coin-operated meters at the city's short-term parking lots will remain the same, at least for now.
Hacker said the machines are easy to use but that some people may face a learning curve.
"In the beginning, we'll have ambassadors showing them the steps," Hacker said. "Once they do it once or twice, they should have no problems."
