Stricter Parking Enforcement In Houston—Real Story Behind Solar Powered Meters

The City of Houston is going to step up enforcement at Downtown parking meters. The city is going enforce the limit of two hours at a meter even if you’ve paid the $6 all day Downtown Hopper rate. Parking enforcement officers will be tracking cars with handheld devices. They’ll plug your license plate number in and see how long you hang around. Even if you have paid for more time, you will get a ticket after two hours.

It is now also illegal for someone else to put money in your meter. I could write a check to pay your income tax bill or your electricity bill (I won’t though.) , but I can’t put 50 cents in your parking meter.

I’m not a reflexive basher of city services, but here’s the thing—THE METERS SO OFTEN DO NOT WORK. (That was my first all caps sentence in two and a half years of writing this blog.)

Our Houston parking meters are solar-powered meters. Yet often they don’t function even when the sun is shining. Here is a post I made last July about the solar-powered meters not working on a sunny 95 degree day.

Since then I’ve had a number of instances where I could not use the meters because they were not working. I go downtown between one to three times a week.

Maybe six weeks ago, I called a city councilmember’s office to complain. In the week after Christmas, I had a morning where I had to go to five meters (moving my car twice in the process) to find one that worked.

In my view, it’s clear the sunbeams the meters are collecting are being diverted to some kind of new and terrible solar weapon such as you see below.  This is the only possible answer as to why Houston councilmembers Sue Lovell and James Rodriguez would talk in the newspaper about stricter parking enforcement, without talking about how the meters, time and time again, do not work.  

Maybe the more people who try to use the meters without success, the more destructive energy the meters collect. It could be that beyond sunlight, the meters are also sapping human energy given off in incidents of extreme frustration trying to get the meters to work.   

Well, it’s one thing if Ms. Lovell and Mr. Rodriguez are the henchpeople of our military industrial complex (Assuming what you see below is a weapon of American or even Earth origin). That does not by definition get in the way of my finding a place to park. I  just wish that they would find a plan that would allow people to come to Downtown Houston and use a parking meter without such hassle.