Photo credit: DOT
New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez kicked off the citywide rollout of upgraded, modern parking meters in Upper Manhattan on May 8, 2024, beginning at West 166th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
The meters’ new Pay-by-Plate technology is paperless and will allow users to enter their license plate number instead of displaying a receipt on their vehicle’s dashboard. Starting May 8, crews will gradually upgrade parking meters, beginning in Northern Manhattan and progressively advancing southward. The meter upgrades will continue this year and next and extend to the rest of Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.
Pay-by-Plate parking makes paying for parking easier than ever, with drivers no longer needing to leave paper receipts on their dashboards. Retrofitted meters will include a large, modern, full- color, backlit display visible in all conditions that allows for the display of payment information and the entry of license plate information. Meters will have multiple language options and the opportunity for contactless tap and go credit card payments. The Pay-by-Plate upgrade also helps eliminate the illegal practice of transferring parking time to a different zone or vehicle via paper receipt.
Throughout the city, parking meters issue approximately eight miles of paper receipts daily. The length of receipt rolls printed annually totals roughly 2,500 miles, the distance between New York City and Los Angeles. Transitioning to the Pay-by-Plate model curbs the carbon footprint, lessens maintenance and repair requirements, and contributes to cleaner streets with reduced litter.
Once fully installed across all 80,000 of the city’s metered parking spaces, drivers will input their license plate number and state into an on-street parking meter and complete the payment. The process aligns with the payment system already in place via the ParkNYC app, with over 1.8 million users. As with the app, transactions from the meters are instantaneously synced with the NYPD parking enforcement systems so that traffic agents can use handheld enforcement devices to easily identify which drivers have paid.
Detailed information on the deployment schedule, how to use the meters, and other parking information can be found at nyc.gov/paythemeter.
In addition, the location of metered blockfaces across New York City can be found on the NYC DOT webpage.
Related Images:
