Nobody enjoys paying for parking. It’s even worse when you find out a parking meter took more of your money than was absolutely necessary. It appears that’s just what is happening down in the city of Colorado Springs.
This story came to our attention from Ryan Warner, host of the Colorado Matters show on Colorado Public Radio. Posting on BlueSky, Warner noted that the modern digital parking meters seemed more than happy to take more than their fair share. “So far as I can tell, parking meters in downtown Colorado Springs allow you to add time past enforcement hours— rather than limiting your payment,” said Warner.
It’s a matter of dollars and cents at the most. Ultimately, though, it feels unjust. If the digital parking meter knows there are only twenty minutes left in the paid parking window, why would it take more of your money?
Enforcement ended at 8pm. There’s still 20 minutes on the meter at the time of this posting.
— Ryan Warner (@ryanhasaquestion.bsky.social) July 2, 2025 at 12:39 PM
The problem with the Colorado Springs meters seems relatively simple. When paying by card, the user must choose the amount of payment, and thus the valid parking time, with the up and down buttons on the meter. City parking rules state that parking beyond certain times is free. However, the meter will make no effort to stop you from extending your payment beyond these times. For example, the meter will happily let you pay a full $1.50 for an hour of parking at 7:30 PM, even though parking is free after 8 PM.
It’s not a huge robbery on the part of the meter. Regardless, digital parking meters in many other jurisdictions are smart enough to only charge for the required time remaining. Thus, it’s somewhat galling for the Colorado Springs meters to eat the additional payment, particularly given the current time is displayed right on the screen.
“I visit Colorado Springs on reporting trips and it’s the first and only place where I’ve experienced meters that don’t max out at the end of enforcement hours,” Warner told me. “It has been this way for years in downtown Colorado Springs.” He’s not the only Coloradan who finds it frustrating, either. “I share this gripe, it drives me nuts,” local author Rebecca Boyle posted on BlueSky.
Warner notes that he reported the matter to city officials, who noted it will be replacing its current meters later this year. The city has even released an exciting 11-minute podcast on a huge raft of pending changes to parking in Colorado Springs, if you’re so inclined to listen. The new solar-powered meters will still accept coins, along with credit card and app-based payments, and replacement of existing meters is expected to take about a year or so, according to the The Denver Gazette. There was no specific word on whether the new meters will avoid overcharging parkers, though.
The Autopian contacted parking authorities at the City of Colorado Springs for comment. “Current meters are at the end of their useful life,” explained Parking Enterprise Manager Alyssa Alt. “We will investigate the payment timeframe issue and work to update those meters that don’t reflect it while proceeding with the Parking Enterprise’s replacement plan.” Going forward, the city expects fewer issues in this area with the new meters. “They will be much easier to program to reflect operating hours,” stated Alt. “We are looking forward to a successful update to our meter system that will better serve the people of Colorado Springs.”
How many cities run a video podcast that covers parking issues? Colorado Springs sure does!
It’s worth noting that this problem is not unheard of, particularly in a historical context. Traditional mechanical parking meters had no way of telling the time. It was up to the end user to figure out how much money to put in to get the meter to the end of the paid parking period. At the same time, that was a reasonable technical limitation. The modern marking meters are fully aware of what time it is, and they even process payments digitally. Thus, it’s hard to understand why the payment interface would allow you to add additional parking time that you don’t actually have to pay for.
Top image credit: Ryan Warner/CPS News (provided)
Traditional mechanical parking meters had no way of telling the time. It was up to the end user to figure out how much money to put in to get the meter to the end of the paid parking period.
It’s 2025, how dare you expect me to math and think!!
Are the meters managed directly by the city or is there a company managing the payment portion of the meters for them? If the latter then the question is who gets to keep the surplus?
If it is the latter, I would be curious what the contract and the entire procurement process says (specs, scope of services, etc…).
Huh? In the scope of local government incompetence, I rank this about a 2/10 and barely worthy of the space it’s taking up on an internet server.
Yes, in a perfect world, we’d all pay for precisely what we use. The bigger elephant in the room is how much parking fees have gone up since we moved to digital payment methods. Psychologists have known since the advent of instant credit card payments that the physical act of handing cash over tends to reduce people’s spending by 20-30% in almost every arena of life (sort of the cornerstone of Dave Ramsay’s ethos, and it’s not wrong). That’s why so many places are willing to take credit cards or phone payments, despite the transaction fees they have to pay. The additional spend makes it worthwhile.
Now let’s talk about how food and grocery delivery services round up the prices of everything on websites, plus fees, plus tip! Hard-hitting stuff 🙂
Don’t get me started on tip inflation or how they incorrectly calculate the “recommended” amount….More clouds to yell at…
Really? Around here the recommended amounts are usually lower than I leave because they don’t include tax in the calculation, whereas I generally tip based on the total bill.
Breaking news: Colorado Spring parking meter are taking an extra $1.50 from some parkers…
Cities with red light cameras: Awww that’s cute
LOL. My dad once got a AI-generated ticket in DC for “aggressive driving”.
Almost 15 years ago. At age 60+. At 10pm. With no other traffic. The camera algorithm just didn’t like the speed at which he was changing lanes on an empty road. And the $50 fine made it not worthwhile to fight because he lived over an hour away.
I am not at all surprised at this given that Colorado Springs is run by a bunch of MAGA types more than happy to steal from the general public to enhance their budget. Not at all shocking is that the “big city” to the north of the Springs (Denver) has had digital meters for decades that can properly charge people based on the time of day and will not let you overpay once you hit the end of the enforcement period.
I always thought Ryan Warner sounded so so smarmy on NPR out there. I attended the hill climb at Pike’s Peak once and visited Manitou Springs another time, otherwise I found no reason to visit the COS area.
I loved Manitou Springs, Garden of the Gods and Pikes Peak. It just seemed to me that CS just had their own click. But what do I know.
I always thought Manitou looked pretty cool, Pike’s, Garden of the Gods, all of that. I haven’t been there since I was a kid in the late 80s, though. To me coming from the East, anywhere with mountains and open spaces seemed awesome.
I read an article just a few months ago about the failures of Libertarianism (maybe a little biased) but it actually used COS as their case study. They wanted so badly to run the city like a business, but the result was things like an increase in crime because they decided to run the street lights on an alternating basis to save some money. And also, generally speaking, you can’t really run a city like a business. You have too much duty to the citizens. This isn’t Robocop 🙂
I lived in CS in 2016, 2017. After going to two job fairs at the Broadmore and being more than qualified for almost every job in the building, I could not find a job. Leaving the second time I ran into an employee walking to the parking lot. I explained my frustration to him. He then asked me where I was from and I replied Texas. He instantly said that’s your problem.
CS has a local “good ole boys” club and if you don’t belong to it then don’t waste your time moving to this hell hole
I guess that’s just the price you pay for not checking the time. It’s not like you request 20 minutes and it takes an hour. When they were solely coin operated sometimes you had to overpay to get the time you needed. Being digital doesn’t relieve the user of their responsibility to know the rules and act accordingly.
If parking is free from 20:00 to 09:00, and you put an hour’s worth of money into a German meter at 19:30, it will happily accept it and show that parking is paid until 09:30.
Pittsburgh removed all meters a few years ago, there are now kiosks on each block. You enter in your plate # and pay by coin/cash/cc. They are programmed not to overcharge during free hours. I usually put the reciept on the dash just in case.
Cincinnati has these everywhere also. Or, lots of cities use apps now also, which is fun when you travel and have to set up multiple accounts.
I suppose it’s nice for those who want this, but for me it really is faster and more convenient to drop a few coins in a slot. But the new systems take less effort and fewer employees on the part of the municipality so they’re here to stay.
It also allows more parking flex for today’s large vehicles.
And they can change their rates on the fly.
I live in a big college football town. Sometimes one could get lucky and find street parking near campus and it was free on weekends. Now, with the app based system, they automatically go into ‘game day’ mode, like $20 hr or something.
Toronto is like that too.
so..over..podcasts..and..social..media..die..already
ooops sorry, wasn’t sensitive enough. Unalive…already
It’s fine, this isn’t tic t*ke cars die all the time here.
As a resident of Colorado Springs, another thing these meters (and probably a lot of others) do is double charge spots when users pay digitally. If you pay through the app, the meter light does not turn green. It stays red. So you can get into a spot that has 30min on it from the last person, but still have to pay yourself because the meter has no indication there is money on it.
I think I’m ok with that. I pull into a space assuming I’m on the hook for whatever it costs. Free parking is an awesome bonus, however I don’t think it’s something we’re entitled to, even if the previous parker left time remaining.
That sort of relates to people getting in trouble for feeding expired meters to help someone avoid a ticket. I can imagine someone writing a ticket because a driver piggybacked on a previous parker and didn’t pay their own.
I see someone else’s overage as just part of life. I’ll take it, then it gets paid forward to the next person. I’ve even flagged people down to take my spot if I have 30+ minutes left.
To be fair, I only park in metered spots 1-2 times/year.
It seems like a bigger issue than it really is, primarily because the only paid parking is in the downtown area and Old Colorado City area – most of Colorado Springs doesn’t have paid parking, and even where they have paid parking the enforcement is pretty lax.
Also, the meter replacement has been forthcoming for a long time and is long, long overdue. Most of the meters are retrofitted coin meters that only sometimes work, so it isn’t like parking in Denver and other major cities where there is a phone app or truly smart meters that handle the transactions – it’s a dumb meter with a card reader glued onto it that will take as much money as you put into it because the meter is too dumb to know better and the city has no data beyond the card transaction info to know who paid when, just that someone paid a specific amount.
It will be nice when they get all the meters replaced and it becomes as easy to pay for parking as it is in most of Denver.
where does the data go?
it seems to me it would be straightforward for CS to determine whom paid too much and how much.
extra credit to compare overpayments with cost to CS to issue individual refunds and establish a cut-off.
…or just say f**kit, which seems they’ve already decided.
Sounds about right for co springs. I didn’t realize they had parking meters but it’s grown so much I guess not that surprising. Always some strange issue with city utilities and water there. Boulder used to have a similar issue with meters but the meter maids would come around and give you free time so I guess it averaged out. Seems to be a Colorado thing.
Although I no longer live in Colorado, I still regret the amendment that would have made so-called not for profit businesses (e.g. Focus on the Family) pay for sewer, water, fire department and police, streets, etc. didn’t pass by 1%.
At the time, Colorado Springs was getting a large influx of mostly religion-adjacent businesses setting up there.
In San Francisco, a saw a parking meter that charged $1.25/minute with a maximum of $30 (24 minutes). Needless to say, I chose to walked everywhere.
In Sycamore, Illinois, parking meters in their downtown area charge $0.01 for 12 minutes, or $0.05 per hour with a 2 hour time limit. It’s a town of 18,000 that still uses vintage penny parking meters. Parking tickets are $1.00.
Are the meter maids making $0.25/hr? Otherwise I don’t see how this is worth anyone’s time.
Honor system perhaps, it’s free
Interesting question! I found a job posting for their part time Parking Meter Officer. The person is responsible for citing violators, managing and logging fines, and repair of the meters. The person is also viewed as a representative of their police department when interacting with the public. It’s 15-20 hours/week union position. I found a copy of their city budget, and the position likely pays above $20/hour. The parking fees and fines cover the salary, so the main purpose is maintaining parking turnover and shopping traffic for local retailers, while providing employment for a local resident. Thaks JJ, learned something new!
In most places, the purpose of metered parking is to keep the spots turning over, not to generate significant revenue. In congested areas,businesses benefit from the turnover.
Sounds not unlike the town I grew up in Iowa. Pennies gave you ~12 minutes and parking tickets were 50 cents. But that was quite a while ago, no idea what it’s like now.
I’m thinking about starting a podcast about how there are too many podcasts these days.
25% tariff on all podcasting equipment.
Paying to park on the street that I already paid taxes to create it BS. There is a town near Santa Cruz CA. that enforces parking like it’s their only source of income. I now refuse to go there for any reason. Eating a nice dinner and I have to run out to add time to the meter. Are they serious?
I follow Ryan on Bluesky and never expected his post to end up on the Autopian. That’s a pretty deep pull. But now I’m wondering how many other cities run into this sort of issue? I live somewhere with almost no metered parking, so I have no frame of reference.