No Coins, No Problem with New FlexPay Meter Pilot Project

On Beverly Hills' North Canon Drive, this new meter provides a new option: pay with plastic.  Photo by Sharifah Chammas.

by: Sharifah Chammas 

BEVERLY HILLS –  All motorists can relate to the dilemma posed  coin-only parking meters create: scraping up sufficient loose change – excluding pennies – to feed the meter to avoid a hefty parking ticket.  Citizens report desperately rummaging through pockets or purses, scouring cars’ astray or console and coming up empty-handed, asking strangers for change or the worse – “borrowing” change.

Those days may become extinct in the cities of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.  The two cities partnered and spearheaded a pilot project to install and test more than two dozen FlexPay meters that afford people the convenient option to pay by Visa, MasterCard, debit cards or the old standby – coins. 

 “The obvious thing is the convenience,” said Rod Marquez, Parking Operations Officer for West Hollywood.  “I don’t like to carry change and for the most part I don’t carry change in my pockets.”

And so far feedback on the meters has been positive.   

“We were talking to people as they were paying and they were surprised and amazed,” Marquez said.  We have not had any complaints.”

Similarly, the Beverly Hills hotline has not received any complaints according to Beverly Hills Parking Manager Don McCall.  “The customers as well as the business on Canon see the meters as a plus.”

Along with Huntington Beach, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are the first cities in the world to use these hi-tech meters, according Dennis Frey, one of the IPS Group, Inc. engineers who installed the FlexPay meters.

The San Diego-based IPS Group Inc. pioneered the innovative wireless, solar-powered meters and supplied them to Beverly Hills and West Hollywood free of charge cities’ for a six-month trial period.   The new meters also use existing poles and fit the infrastructure in the traditional meters.

“It was not a massive project,” Frey said. “It takes less than a few minutes to remove the head of the old meter and pop on the new one.”  IPS installed twelve meters on the 300 block of North Canon Drive  and 18 meters on the 1000 block of LaBrea Avenue at the West Hollywood Gateway Center.  It took less than an hour to install the meters in both cities. 

Besides the obvious convenience of credit card option, the FlexPay meters address another epidemic problem in Los Angeles: traffic congestion.

In Los Angeles, on major traffic fairways meters cannot be used during rush hour times and one parked car at a meter at the wrong time can block an entire lane and result in a traffic juggernaut. 

And multiples signs traffic signs placed are not always effective according to Marquez.  “We post more signs than necessary but people are still in a hurry so they think they can park there.”

The advanced FlexPay meters' “particular ability to display messages with  feature free form text can inform public that they cannot park at the meter during peak toll hours and reduce the amount of people getting towed,” Marquez said. 

“It’s about keeping traffic flowing.  We are doing our best to prevent people from getting towed because it causes a great burden on all the traffic trying to get through.”

Also, increased credit card use would cut down on the frequency of collection and save time, Marquez said.  The meter canisters can only hold a limited amount of coins.    

“FlexPay” provide credit card users with a simple step-by-step guide.  Steering clear of any baffling technical jargon, the meter’s brief directions spell out each step in basic terms even the technically-challenged can easily follow: insert the credit card; press the plus sign to add time to the meter or the minus sign to subtract minus; then press ok.  If the person makes a mistake, then they press cancel and start again.  That’s it.  Or of course, the person can resort to the old-fashioned method of feeding coins to the meter.

Facing Extinction? IPS Engineer Frey likens  the coin-only meters (pictured left) to a Laundromats since both consume hordes of coins. 

Photo by Sharifah Chammas 

Frey says IPS Group designed the FlexPay to make paying with credit card just as simple as using coins.  “We set the meters up in a fashion that’s very intuitive on how you use a meter with coins."  And most new customers discovered that paying a credit card was not only easy; it was less time consuming than searching for and standing at a meter dropping coin after coin. 

As part of the team of engineers to oversee the project's launch, Frey monitored and spoke with passerbys who continuously stopped in their tracks to admire the new meter's cool, ultra modern look and first-time customers excited about convenience FlexPay meters offer.  The most repeated reaction was: "Wow, thank God this is finally here." 

“All transactions are very safe.  Nobody knows your credit card number and nobody can mishandle that,” Beverly Hills Mayor Jimmy Delshad stated.  FlexPay meters’ are equipped with a highly sophisticated encryption to protect credit card numbers and prevent hackers from accessing them.  “The encryption technology used is the same as used by banks and credit cards,” the mayor said. 

IPS engineer Frey adds, “No data is stored on the meter.  When you insert your credit card, it automatically goes to the bank, so your information is not stored anywhere online or in any sort of database.

If someone took a sledgehammer, and slammed the meter they would not be able to take anything except for coins,” Frey said. 

According to Frey, “It’s safer than using your credit card on the internet where your information is stored and servers can access it.”

The trial period is expected to last six months.    “From our observations we have seen a few customers reach for their credit cards, at the same time we realize when we introduce new technology it takes time for our customers to adjust. This is why we are testing the new parking meter for six months,” McCall said.