Civic inheritance

Here in San Luis Obispo, the downtown area's street parking has largely migrated to license plate-tied pay stations and a PayByPhone mobile app.

When I began frequenting this area about ten years ago each designated street parking spot had a parking meter like you see above. It accepted coins, cards (chip or strip), and—more recently—contactless forms of payment.

A given parking meter represented a one-to-one relationship with its physically adjacent parking spot. Associating a license plate with the parking payment was wholly unnecessary. The spatial association was obvious, and clearly enforceable by the city.

PayByPhone isn't a bad mobile app by any means. It even lets you pay for parking without creating an account (!), and remembers your vehicle/license plate history via local device storage.

My most salient complaint—outside of its obvious contributions to mass surveillance—is that this license plate and database-driven parking system is anti-social.

In the previous era, I could pre-pay for 45 minutes of parking whilst only needing 15 of those minutes. The remaining 30 minutes would remain associated with that parking spot and be civically inherited by the next person to park there.

It was a passive pay-it-forward scheme and it was amazing.

Arriving at a parking meter that had 25 minutes of remaining time from the previous person's transaction was like winning a tiny lottery. And with the roles reversed, it was the philanthropic mini-rush of giving $1.30 of value to a stranger.

San Luis Obispo still has a number of these older meters at the edges of downtown. And when parking is necessary, I like to seek them out over the more modern alternative.