Two Down, One To Go. Off and Running To A Great Start With The $10,000 Kiosks!

I've said it previously on HUDseen: It's the level of professionalism from Hudson City Hall that really impresses me.  

The way I see it, the transformation of the city's parking revenue collection infrastructure from meters to kiosks is a litmus test for City Hall.  This is a hugely ambitious project that is now solely in the hands of the Police Department.  No, that is not a typo.  It's true: this transformative project is not being handled at all by the newly formed and relocated Parking Bureau, but by the Hudson Police Department, the agency in charge of all things law enforcement and keeping us safe and secure.  And, if I'm to believe what he told me last week, our Acting Police Chief, Captain David Miller (who may also be our interim Police Commissioner), is the city official responsible for the parking kiosks.  The buck stops with him, so to speak.  How can this possibly go wrong?  Or, more accurately perhaps, how can this go right?  It was wrong from the start over a year ago and has only worsened.

Note: The clear plastic bags that have been covering the six kiosks for the past several months were all recently removed, whether or not the kiosks were scheduled to be "up and running."  The remaining ten $10,000 parking kiosks meant for on-street parking won't make their way out of the storage shed at the DPW garage anytime soon, certainly not this year.  The 16 kiosks arrived in February of this year.  

Late last week, a few days after City Hall (on its website) and HPD (on Fakebook) both announced that three of the six parking lot kiosks were "up and running," I stopped by the Warren Street lot next to MOTO to see how well its kiosk was faring. The first thing I noticed was a small laminated sign upside down on the ground at the base of the kiosk's left side.  Covered in masking tape, it had obviously fallen off the kiosk after having been taped to it a few days prior.  Sure enough, as I expected, two of the same laminated signs were still taped to the kiosk, one to the front and one to the right side.  That was Friday afternoon at 2:00.

Friday, "sign" up!  Kiosk "running"!

Yesterday, 72 hours later, I came across this:

Then, today, I came across this in the middle of the parking lot:

How much do you suppose this cost in materials 
and time (salary).  Multiply by three.

You gotta wonder whose idea it was to tape the important signs (there were three of them after all!) to the kiosk.  It seemed like a Rob Perry move to me, but DPW has nothing to do with the kiosks besides possibly installing them in the ground. 

Will the parking gurus at HPD give masking tape one more try with the signs?  How about magnets?  Glue?  Just give up?  Here's a novel idea for someone: how about a shiny new metal sign attached to a sturdy metal sign pole imbedded in the concrete next to the kiosk like normal people would think to do!  Of course, as Jen Belton is well aware, signs cost money and effort to design and build.

Last week, HUDseen claimed that the three "up and running" kiosks were "useless."  I was wrong about the kiosk next to MOTO and the one at the Amtrak lot.  (I still consider the one at 325 Columbia to be useless, whether it is "up and running" or not.)  The fellow in the picture below, taken on Friday, actually successfully used the kiosk to print out a "permit" -- that's the name the kiosk screen gives to the tiny receipts that are printed out -- so that his car wouldn't be ticketed in the MOTO lot.  It took him a whole lot longer to get a "permit" to his dashboard than it would have taken to insert a quarter or three into the meter, in part because he had to walk back to his car to read and memorize his own license plate number to be able to complete the transaction at the kiosk.  I asked him if he knew that the meters in the lot were still available for use.  "Yeah, I know," he replied, "but I don't have any quarters."

It's a good thing he had a credit card, because the kiosk (like all 16 the city purchased) won't accept paper currency, only quarters.  Yes, the city bought $140,000 of the wrong parking kiosks but, apparently, the Police Department is going to make do with them for now instead of sending them back to the manufacturer or to a landfill.  Why let a little mistake made by the Parking Study committee ruin HPD's grand plan to soon be swimming in parking revenue?

Now, what about all those missing kiosk signs that Jen Belton and her Parking Study committee experts spent so much time planning, designing and discussing with the parking consultant from Long Island?  Where the hell are those important signs?  I didn't hear Jen, Tom Depietro, Dewan Sarowar (!), the consultant or any of the other parking experts in the room suggest taping plastic laminated "signs" to kiosks, did you?  They would have been tarred and feathered and laughed out of town, right?