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Salt Lake City Will Introduce New Parking System

Photo by PilotGirl, CC via Flickr

Installed in the spring of 2012, many of the 344 blue kiosks have consistently malfunctioned.  Credit cards weren’t being read and some drivers had trouble reading the kiosk screens at night. Now the city is working

quickly to replace the system. Robin Hutcheson is Transportation Director in Salt Lake City. She says the kiosks themselves will be left up.

“A company will replace the entire guts, if you will, of our tall blue parking pay stations, as well as the front panel—to improve the user experience of it—and as well as the software,” she says.

The city hasn’t revealed what company will make the improvements, or provided a timeline for when it will happen. Aparc Systems is the company that first supplied the kiosks.

The city of Juneau, Alaska, also purchased parking kiosks from Aparc Systems. They abandoned the system last year. Rob Steedle is Juneau’s Deputy City Manager. He says Juneau residents experienced their own trouble with the system.

“What we were finding is that the machines were not reliably communicating back to Aparc’s servers, and so we could not say that we knew that a person had not paid,” he says.

Now Juneau is suing Aparc Systems for failing to solve the problem. Robin Hutcheson wouldn’t comment on whether Salt Lake would seek legal action. She says that drivers can already test out a version of the new parking system. There are two updated kiosks—one outside the Salt Lake County building, the other on State Street between 3rd and 4th South.    

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