New York City is serving up out new parking meters that will allow drivers to “pay-by-plate.”
The new meters, which will first be rolled out in Upper Manhattan on May 8 before a gradual rollout to the rest of the city, will allow New Yorkers to pay for parking by entering their license plate number into the meter.
That will allow the city to stop producing massive amounts of waste from paper parking receipts, which parkers place on their dashboard as proof of payment.
Each year, New York City parking meters produce about 2,500 miles worth of receipts, enough to stretch all the way from New York to Los Angeles, the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT) says.
“Our new pay-by-plate parking meters are simple to use and will make short-term parking easier for everyone,” DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a statement. “Drivers will no longer need to worry about leaving a paper receipt on their dashboard and can use the convenience of the ParkNYC app to pay the meter while on the go.”
DOT plans to retrofit its existing meters to the pay-by-plate model, rather than installing new ones. The meters will be synced to the NYPD’s parking enforcement systems and will feed real-time data to traffic agents about parkers overstaying their meter.
Drivers can also pay for parking using the ParkNYC app, which eliminates the need to go to a meter at all.
The price of metered parking varies widely across the city. In Manhattan’s core central business district, the first hour of parking costs $5.50, while in much of the outer boroughs it is only $1.5o. Most of the city’s curbside spots are free.
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