HONOLULU (KHON2)–If you’ve tried to use a credit card at a smart parking meter downtown and it hasn’t worked, you’re not alone. The city confirmed the problem stems from Verizon decommissioning an outdated network and said it may take months to resolve.
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The city is facing big parking problems after it said Verizon shut down its 2G and 3G networks.
According to the city, roughly 2,200 digital parking meters may not accept credit card payments in Honolulu’s downtown and Waikiki areas because of it.
In a statement Verizon said:
“Since 2016, we have stated publicly that we have been actively decommissioning our 3G CDMA network. As of December 31, 2022, months after our competitors shut off their networks completely, we decommissioned the network. Initially, we announced we would close down our 3G network in 2019. However, we extended our shut off date to the end of 2022 in order to care for our customers and give them every effort to minimize disruptions to their service as they moved to newer and more advanced technologies.”
While plastic might not be working at the digital meters, the city said the meters still do take coins.
Make sure you have a lot of quarters handy because, the city said it could take six months, possibly even longer, to get the issue resolved.
A spokesperson for the Honolulu Police Department said: “HPD will temporarily suspend issuing citations for the affected parking meters while this situation is being addressed. There will be no change to the enforcement or collections procedures for strictly coin-operated parking meters.”
City Council Member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam said the city will be losing a lot of parking revenue.
“Clearly six months of not enforcing on parking meters is going to create a lot of issues so I wanna make sure that we talk with HPD and DTS to make sure that in the short term we figure it out,” Dos Santos-Tam said. “But over the long term, we need to get back to making sure people are paying for parking and not taking up stalls.”
Amanda Cortez, who uses the digital meter parking said there’s always been problems paying with a credit card
“It’s been an ongoing thing,” Cortez explained. “Before COVID I used to work across the street and it was the same thing also.”
“So it’s not just in the last couple of days?” asked KHON.
“No,” Cortez responded.
“We’ve known that many of these credit card meters haven’t been working anyway so it begs the question we couldn’t do those upgrades we couldn’t fix it and here we are we’re now with the entire system down,” Dos Santos-Tam said. “What’s next what can we do to be proactive so we’re not surprised again.”
The city plans to share more information on the issue Friday. Stay tuned to KHON2 on air and online for the latest.
