The City of Kamloops is reviewing its contract with its parking pay-station suppliers after another round of technical malfunctions with meters on the busiest street in the downtown core for four days.
It’s the fourth time technical issues have disrupted the machines since they were installed in November of 2013, though previous outages lasted only a few hours.
David Duckworth, the city’s director of community safety and corporate services, said the city is in talks with its legal team about its contract with PreciseParklink, the company that supplied the city’s meters and which contracts with Parkeon for server services.
Duckworth noted the city has not yet paid Precise for its machines and services to date, aside from the monthly $75-per-machine data fee that allows credit-card transactions from the kiosks, adding the company’s contract is still under review.
“Obviously, we have some very serious concerns,” he said.
Trouble with the machines began on Friday, Oct. 17, and continued through the weekend.
Community safety manager Jon Wilson told KTW the issue stemmed from French company Parkeon, which oversees servers for the pay stations.
Parkeon experienced connectivity issues in a number of cities across Canada using pay-by-licence plate systems — but only certain machines were failing to communicate with its servers.
In Kamloops’ case, 12 machines on Victoria Street were out of service, but the rest of the downtown network was in full working order, Wilson said.
“This one’s a little bit harder for them to diagnose and that’s why it’s taken a bit longer, because it’s affecting 12 out of the 90-plus machines that they have,” he said during the kiosk breakdowns.
The city posted signs on the downed meters on Tuesday, Oct. 21, advising shoppers they could park for free for up to three hours.
Wilson said the overall pay-station system generates about $3,600 per day, with Victoria Street the busiest area, but he said the city is less concerned about financial impacts from the outages than the effect on downtown businesses.
“That’s why we’ve put signs up on the machines to say the machines are temporarily out of order and there’s free three-hour parking in that area, because we don’t want the businesses to be impacted by their clients knowing whether they can park or not,” he said.
Wilson said the city is working with PreciseParklink, which supplies the meters and contracts Parkeon for server services, to try to resolve the issue permanently.
“They need to have those serious discussions with Parkeon as well because the city paid for a reliable system and these challenges are a little problematic and we want to get them addressed,” he said.
Duckworth said the reason Kamloops’ system may seem more glitch-prone than other digital pay systems is because the city opted for pay-by-licence-plate parking, which was seen as more convenient than a pay-by-space model.
“Pay-by-licence-plate is newer technology,” he said.
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