Finally finding a parking spot after driving around endlessly can be life saving depending on how elevated your blood pressure got. Finding out you have no change for the meter can almost push you back over the edge. Think about how many times you’ve dived into a local store to buy something in order to get some change, or worse decided to just take the chance and return to a $35 ticket (I live in San Francisco). I’ve seen that there is an effort to put in these giant, most likely costly, electronic meters that have a keypad for account entry. I’ve only seen them around the motorcycle spots in the city. I imagine it’s a pilot to determine the benefits and cost associated with this new kind of metering. Well, I think there is a better answer. I drive through toll booths skipping lines with a little unit in my car that debits an account. I believe all it contains is a small Radio Frequency Identification Tag (RFID), which is becoming increasingly more popular in supply chain management. I think the government should put a tag on each license plate so that I don’t have to worry about having change for the meter. I would just pull up and it would debit my account. Of course this would most likely also mean I would be immediately debited for the parking ticket when I park somewhere illegally. Now, I am as big of a privacy concerned citizen as any. Most of my friends know I go so far as to make up names for things such as grocery club cards, but I do think there is more promise to these RFID tags then just letting Wal-Mart know it’s out of Gillette razors.
Posted by darinarcher at April 25, 2004 07:31 PM