Press Releases

IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Release #20-003
Monday, January 6, 2020
Contact: Scott Gastel/Alana Morales (212)839-4850

DOT Announces Significant Progress in Fixing City’s Parking Meters

Crews from multiple agencies have manually repaired over two-thirds of the City’s 14,000 meters; Credit-card payment outage was caused by a vendor’s New Year software failure

New York — The New York City Department of Transportation today announced that City work crews had made significant progress in repairing the City’s municipal parking meters, reconfiguring software on the meters to allow credit card payments. As of Monday morning, 9,906 of the City’s 14,000 meters have been repaired, including at all municipal lots and at locations where credit-card use is the highest. DOT has committed to have all meters Citywide repaired by this Thursday.

“Thanks to the hard work and dedication of DOT’s parking team, led by the Meter Maintenance team and a core group of Traffic Device Maintainers who spearheaded the effort, we have made big progress over the weekend in restoring the full functioning of the City’s muni-meters,” said DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg. “We also deeply thank our sister agencies for aiding in the effort. While this ‘Y2K2X’ software glitch was not of our making, we will continue our round-the-clock efforts to fix all the meters — and we thank the public for their patience.”

Card payments at municipal meters had been blocked since last Thursday, when software installed in the meters experienced a “Y2K”-like New Year glitch, a problem for which the vendor Parkeon/Flowbird has taken responsibility. Beginning last Thursday evening, DOT coordinated more than 200 workers to manually fix the issue at each meter. DOT staff were supplemented by electricians and other field technicians from many sister agencies, including DOE, DEP, NYCParks, Buildings, and DCAS.

Through this Thursday, crews will continue to make repairs, finishing up at meters where coins make up the majority of payments. In the meantime, payments can continue to be made at all meters by coins or via credit card on the ParkNYC app. Drivers who find a non-functioning meter should immediately report it to 311 with the meter number.

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