St. Louis City testing new high-tech parking meters


ST. LOUIS, MO (KPLR) - Change is coming for people parking in St. Louis. They will start noticing new, high-tech parking meters Monday.

It's part of a test program by the city treasurer's office that will end with the city modernizing its meters and giving drivers different ways to pay.

Some of those meters are on 10th Street just off Washington Avenue. It's one of four locations where drivers will see the new option.  Instead of feeding an individual meter with change, drivers will put in their space number into this station and pay that way.

The new technology will give drivers a choice to pay with coins, credit cards and ultimately mobile phones.  Besides 10th Street between Washington and Chestnut, the new system is being used downtown at Broadway and Pine.

It's also being tested at two spots in the Central West End -- Maryland and Euclid and Laclede and Euclid.  Each site features a different parking system, but the parking rates are remaining the same during the testing period.

There are four vendors involved. Officials say a vendor should be chosen by the fall to modernize the city's more than 10,000 parking meters.


  • ByeByeToTheRite

    This is great, because the city needs to find new and more efficient ways to collect revenue from us normal people, because there are an awful LOT of RICH people with their hands out these days waiting for their welfare handout!

    The list is growing: Peabody Coal, the Rams, the Cardinals – there is a long waiting list of wealthy developers and other rich trash wanting their welfare TIFs and other tax breaks!

    So anything they can do to lower the costs of putting their hands in your pockets is good for the rich, and if it’s good for the rich, it’s good to get those politicans elected again! Only we workers suffer, but since when does our government represent the average worker?

    (Answer: the last time would have been 1979, the last year of Carter’s administration, just before Reagan changed government to only function for the benefit of the wealthy, and successfully brainwashed over half of Americans to believe that was really better for all of us!)

  • michael

    the question that should be being asked is here is, why in a city that is losing business after business and facing an increasing challenge of getting people to come downtown would the city think it a good idea to charge people to park on weekends. it seems like the City proper goes out of its way to add to its own demise. people should lose there jobs over this.

    • morrow

      People will lose jobs over this that,s for sure, but the better one will be the individual meter at each space ,because the walking to pay an atm type machine a half block away is ridiculous and will be a hardship on the handicap and the old. When i go downtown maybe once per month it really makes me sad to see the demise of this once bustling city and i can go back to the late 50s, but i am mainly talking about the 70s. I sit at the traffic light in front of the SWB building on Pine i believe and not one car pull behind me at 11:00 o clock in the morning. I doun’t know what the city should do but raising parking rates and putting in expensive meters is not the answer. A new meter in front of the Closed SWB building is not something that is needed.

  • Mark

    Its already been stated that the US is behind the times for credit card security because current magnetic strip cards are extremely vulnerable to information theft. Why would anybody believe that its a good idea to add any service that increases the opportunity for identity theft. If you must use credit cards on the street you should start with systems that are not consistently exploited.

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