Park for free on Toronto streets with Glitch in parking machines

[riskit]

Glitch in parking machines costing city hundreds of thousands of dollars
Friday, August 01, 2008 - 09:08 AM
By: John Stall

Toronto - Some owners of expired and depleted pre-loaded credit cards have figured out that the city's parking machines are unable to check them and will still let them park, for free.

There are over 17, 000 machines throughout the city and they've been in place for 10 years.

The CBC has learned that Toronto has lost up to $10-million since 1998 from those who've used their expired credit cards on the parking machines.

Scarborough councillor Norm Kelly told 680News the cost of upgrading all the machines would be huge. "In the meantime we're still making a lot of money, so maybe it's one of those things you tolerate."

The Toronto Parking Authority has said it is testing new technology that will correct the problem.

http://680news.com/news/local/articl...01_090030_1392

[sienna owner]

i think ctv or city did a piece on this too...apparently the new system only holds a set number of this invalid numbers as well...and they were able to use the same invalid cc 2 weeks later...

so theoritically, if you have old cc's then you can use one for a couple of days, since it takes that long for them to download the info on their main system and check it, and when you can't use it again, use a diff invalid cc and just rotate them....

[voodoo401]

Stupid city should just only allow cash until they fix the glitch.

[HBP]

AFAIK it's been here for a while. Until a year ago they didn't even invalidate your card, you could use the same one over and over. Then they started to catch on and start invalidating previously used cards, but new ones work.

I wonder when the loss of revenue will be more than the cost of fixing the machines.