by April Siese : sfappeal.com – excerpt
Spiders may become your new best parking friends or worst ticket nightmare when it comes to metered parking in the city. No, our meter maids weren’t taken over by sci-fi arachnids hellbent on ruining the increasingly limited parking options in SF. As CBS5 reports, a malfunctioning meter possibly ruined by spiders is to blame for tickets being wrongfully issued to multiple motorists.
The only problem is, according to California state law those tickets are illegal.
SF has to pass a special ordinance and post signs to allow ticketing at broken meters. Nevertheless, tickets are still being issued to that meter, though proof has been provided to the SFMTA that even when fed, the meter indicates that time is up.
SFMTA Media Relations Manager and unofficial captain of obvious observations Paul Rose told CBS5 that “it looks like it’s operational sometimes and not operational others.”
The ticket appeal process usually takes multiple tries before the ticket itself will be dismissed, making for an even bigger hassle than say, taking Muni… (more)
So now we have defective smart meters. Hopefully the SFMTA is not anticipating buying more of them until they work out the kinks, or I should say the bugs.
Meter Madness 