New York City parking meters rejecting credit cards due to software glitch
NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- Drivers in New York City have been complaining that parking meters are rejecting their credit cards.
The Department of Transportation is blaming Parkeon, the company that makes the payment software.
"The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020, and had never been updated by the company," the DOT said in a statement released Thursday.
Parkeon blamed an anti-fraud security setting that disabled their card payment system for any transactions made after the new year began.
The company has provided the city DOT with a software fix, but it appears the DOT has to reconfigure every one of the 14,000 meters, covering some 85,000 spaces, by hand.
By Friday evening, 1,750 of the city's 14,000 meters had been repaired, and the DOT said they are training and deploying additional electricians throughout the weekend to complete repairs.
The DOT said all citywide repairs should be complete by Thursday evening. In the meantime officials said drivers who don't pay will continue to be ticketed.
The city said drivers always have the option during the outage to use the ParkNYC mobile app or coins.
"Parking meters are still accepting coins, and the ParkNYC app is available for those who prefer to pay by credit card," the DOT said. "The ParkNYC mobile app is available for download at no cost for iPhones in the App Store and for Android at Google Play."
Flowbird Group, which owns Parkeon, issued a statement saying the glitch was with the software and not a breach of their system.
"Yesterday, NYC DOT had muni meter issues city wide, affecting their ability to accept credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards," the statement read. "The outage was caused by an anti fraud security setting that disabled card payment beyond Jan. 1 2020. Flowbird, the provider of the parking solution, has immediately provided a software upgrade fix. The solution is now under deployment in the field by DOT crews. Our investigation confirmed that there was no security breach of the system."
----------
