How many times have you been stuck with a parking ticket due to a thieving parking meter?
You tell it to the cop, he hands you the ticket. The judge says quit whining and pay up.
We’re like the helpless Saxon peasants of old, humbled before cruelly superior technology–these fancy new meters, the electronic models with the blinking liquid crystal displays.
In New York, Miami, Chicago and other big cities, folks are getting stuck with huge parking fines.
According to the International Parking Institute, the government parking business–including meters, parking garages, fines and court fees–hauls in $13 billion to $15 billion of your money each year.
Parking fines make up as much as 20 percent of that–a cool $3 billion annually.
Repeat the mantra. Three billion dollars. Three billion dollars. Three billion dollars.
For too long, we have been subject to the depredations of the parking barons.
But I have discovered a means by which we can fight back and wreak havoc on the parking Harpies in every major city in the country.
Yes, my good people, I have the weapon that will free us.
Now you can tell it to the judge and shame him into giving in to you.
It has been a secret, until now.
All you need is a simple universal TV remote control. We got one at a Walgreens in Chicago for $16.30, tax included. We used an RCA System Link 4.
Just find one of those fancy new meters, point your TV remote control, and wait for a few seconds. Presto–all the time on that meter will disappear.
You can take that remote into court–and argue that you don’t owe the fine. Even if the meter is in working order, you can rightly argue that anyone could have wiped away the time.
We tested it on meters–where no cars were parked, of course–downtown and in two North Side neighborhoods. It works.
“This would be an act of vandalism!,” said Lisa Merrithew, a spokeswoman for J.J. MacKay Canada Ltd., the company that has made tens of thousands of these meters in cities across the U.S., including Chicago and New York.
“It’s much like vandalizing a meter by jamming something in the coin slot,” Merrithew warned.
She kept repeating the word “vandalism” as if to scare me. And she said it might not be a good idea to encourage people to commit such a horrible act on the nice little machines.
Oooooh.
I didn’t have the bad manners to tell her that vandalism is when you act like Cool Hand Luke in the old Paul Newman movie, snipping the heads off the mechanical devil spawn with a pipe cutter.
But pointing an innocent universal remote at a meter and erasing the time isn’t vandalism. It’s like shaking an Etch-A-Sketch after a sweet little child spent hours drawing a picture, say a castle or a tiny lamb.
Sure the kid will cry. But you’re not breaking it. You’re just erasing, like other kids do when they pull the cellophane sheet from a Magic Slate.
Now this trick only works with MacKay Guardian meters made prior to 1999, and at least tens of thousands are out there on the streets, in Chicago and in other cities. Merrithew didn’t say exactly how many, so there could be more.
Here’s how to tell if your meter is vulnerable to the TV remote trick. The MacKay Guardian brand will be stamped on it, and there will be a small bulb to the right of the liquid crystal read out.
You point the remote to the left of the LCD readout–at a little black dot, an infrared sensor-receiving terminal–and press any button on the remote. If the small light bulb turns green, you’ve connected.
“Our R&D people have found that an unauthorized infrared device can interact with the meters,” Merrithew said. “It does not damage or disable them.”
Please clip out this column and show the judge her quote.
Then she told me that on Friday, our questions had caused her company to warn its customers–several big city governments, including Chicago’s–that there was a little problem.
In Chicago alone, the Department of Revenue hauls in about $100 million in parking fines each year. But armed with this knowledge, even your brother-in-law could argue on your behalf and win a parking case.
Stand up and say, “Reasonable doubt, yer aaahnner!” or “Preponderance of the evidence, judge!”
Then have a beer and take the rest of the day off.
Won’t Mayor Richard Daley be happy when he reads this?
“We contacted all of our customers today to tell them that this exists, and we are sending out something to fix it,” she promised.
But sending the new software to the cities, and then finding the manpower to test all the meters and install the new software will cost taxpayers even more. Somebody will pay for it. And MacKay contends it’s the cities’ responsibility to pay. This means you pay.
Also, it will take weeks and weeks–so why not begin the parking revolution now, while the enemy is weak?
Get ready for class action lawsuits, and city bureaucrats scampering to try to save their chunk of parking revenues.
From her office in Nova Scotia, the polite but frosty Merrithew blamed competitors for leaking this information to me.
Should she beat me with a salt cod, I’d still never tell.
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E-mail: jskass@tribune.com
