Thursday, January 11, 2007

How to beat a parking meter in Montreal - old school


I noticed that a local video purportedly showing how to beat the meters has 100,000 views on youtube. I can't follow what she's saying and from what I can tell she's incorrect with her information.
   Here's a sure way to beat the meters. Unfortunately this works only with the old meters with a twist dials. There are few if any of those left in this town. (Lemme know if you know of any ones left.)
   The method is easy. Get a British two pence, they're worth like 5 cents or so. In fact get a big bag of them. The meters mistake them for Canadian one dollar coins. It's theoretically possible that you could get busted feeding two pence coins into the meter. In theory, yes. In practice, no. Using this method, that which cost you a dollar only cost you 5 cents. It's 95 percent off day every day.
   As for how to outsmart the newfangled computerized deals that now cost $6 for two hours, well I'm not sure yet but I'll be sure to let you know as soon as I find out. I sometimes ask the person coming out for their paper so I can at least have their minutes and remember the time that's left. They usually hand them over cheerfully. I'm thinking that popping a big magnet on these meters might do the trick, as computers often don't much like magnets.
   And as for street parking, get a toolbox and a ladder and remove any offensive signage, it takes the city months to replace it.
  Just to add my disclaimer that I do not practice, or condone these actions but I thought it was important for the general edification of the readers of this site.
   Montrealers are getting ripped off big time for parking. Unless parking is viable in the downtown core, people will simply do their shopping at the malls and the city will just sprawl outwords, so it's important to allow cars into the city.

5 comments:

  1. I just wanted to say that many people would argue it is more important to have viable transportation (i.e. public transit) to downtown than viable parking spaces in downtown. Opting for the latter in city planning is a no-no in comtemporary urban planning.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I strongly disagree with that school of thought. Things get done when people can get to places. I am working on getting an interview with a local expert that will articulate this counterintuitive point of view much better than I myself can.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree...we in Montreal are getting screwed when it comes to parking. I do agree with public transportation and all that, but sometimes you just need to take a car.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nick Metaxas1:12 pm

    I agree Jonathan's comment is nonsense. It does seem the city does its best to make driving unpleasant, presumably in an effort to increase bus and metro ridership. Instead of improving public transit, they ruin driving. But there is a large core of motorists (myself among them) who will never give up their car. I'll be the old man in Red Barchetta, with an IC engine in my barn long after it's banned.

    The newish parking meters are especially evil. They make money twice, as one person leaves and another person takes that spot, not knowing if any time is left (unless they are lucky enough to see the previous parker leaving, and do the ticket exchange like the author does). We should start some kind of driver solidarity system whereby departing parkers stick their ticket on the curb for the next person.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A friend of mine once revealed to me that he used to insert a certain denomination of the French Centime into our parking meters and that it worked for years before the Green Onions eventually wised up and had the internal mechanisms changed by management.

    Needless to say, considering the larcenous temptations of human nature having been inbred in many of us, various types of vending machines suffered (and presumably continue to suffer) similar trickery despite persistent attempts to defeat it.

    For example, a certain metal washer regularly sold by local hardware stores evidently had the exact same diameter and thickness of a 25 cent coin. How often these "slugs" were slipped into laundromat washers, dryers, and so on, is anyone's guess.

    However, perhaps the most brazen scam that someone laughingly demonstrated to me one day years ago was during the era when our Metro turnstiles accepted those thin, cardboard transfers that the bus driver handed to passengers (first blue and then later tan-coloured as many will remember); having those pre-punched little holes, bus route number, time-of-issue, and red arrows printed on them, not to mention other proprietary codes which were essentially meaningless to the everyday Joe Public transit user.

    Astonishingly, no one at the STM came to realize that the Paris Metro's purple-coloured transfers--which had been in general usage for year-- were very similar (only 1 millimeter wider, in fact) to ours, so that with a careful trim, they would fit directly into the Montreal Metro turnstiles' slot! Clunk!--and you were through! Free ride!

    To add insult to injury, apparently any and all expired and thus routinely-discarded Paris Metro transfer could potentially be re-used in this manner and could be found by the hundreds littered all over the floors and platforms of every Paris Metro station, so who knows how many scallywag tourists collected them in order to later "reconstitute" them here in Montreal?

    As it was explained to me, it was likely that the dark brown magnetic strips on these Paris Metro transfers successfully fooled our turnstiles into accepting them, thereby inadvertently creating an "International Metro Ticket" as it were.

    Today, with the ubiquitous plastic Opus card-type, RFID fare collection system in place, such shenanigans have become history for the most part. However, some determined European students did manage to back-engineer RFID as well as a challenge in order to find out if they could extend a card fare's expiration times and dates beyond their official ones.

    Perhaps the notion and promotion of FREE PUBLIC TRANSIT will prove to be the ultimate solution to persistent fare evasion.

    ReplyDelete

Love to get comments! Please, please, please speak your mind !
Links welcome - please google "how to embed a link" it'll make your comment much more fun and clickable.