Vandals target parking meters

Vandals are more frequently attacking parking meters in the District, where parking fines range from $25 to $100.

“We have not been able to determine why the increase,” said Douglas Noble, chief traffic engineer for the District Department of Transportation. “We had a similar uptick last spring.”

The D.C. Council voted in July 2002 to exempt its members from parking regulations. The exemption gives council members the same parking privileges as members of Congress: They don’t have to put coins in the meters.

Last month, the city resumed its residential street-sweeping operations, along with enforcing parking restrictions during street-sweeping hours. Street sweepers do not operate during winter months.

Parking enforcers are monitoring “seven or eight different places where the vandalism has centered,” Mr. Noble said. Over the past three weeks, parking enforcers have arrested 14 persons for damaging meters.

Repair workers usually fix about 4,000 meters each month. In February, 7,500 meters needed repair, and last month, 6,900 were broken or vandalized.

“In some areas, the breakdown rate of meters has ranged well over 30 percent,” said Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, who met with city transportation officials this week.

Representatives of the Downtown Cluster inspected more than 300 meters near the Tenleytown Metro stop in Northwest. More than 35 percent were broken, missing or vandalized, Mr. Lynch said.

“These meters, let’s face it, don’t work well,” he said. “They are easily jammed by those who don’t want to pay, and in too many neighborhoods are being tagged or vandalized.”

Transportation spokesman Bill Rice said ordinarily “9 to 10 percent of the meters are inoperable throughout the city.”

The District has 16,300 meters, which are monitored and repaired by ACS State and Local Solutions. The company contracted for the job in 1998, when vandalism had damaged most of the then-40-year-old meters.

The District became the first city in the nation to privatize parking meter operations. Last year, parking enforcers wrote $99 million worth of tickets, and the District collected $53 million in fines. But officials did not know what percentage of tickets were written for parking meter infractions.

The city’s parking meters have high-grade, cast-iron cases that are three times thicker than older meters. Yet vandals still break the curved glass windows, hammer the cases, and paint graffiti or hang signs on the meters.

ACS must repair broken meters within 72 hours or be fined for lost operational time, Mr. Noble said.

Yesterday workers began a six-week project of examining and labeling the city’s 16,300 meters. Each meter will be cleaned, and broken glass domes will be replaced. A label on each machine will list the meter’s identification number, a telephone number to report problems and operating instructions.

Most broken meters are reported by the 235 ticket writers who check for overtime parkers repeatedly between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Meter hours run until 10 p.m. through the weekend in Georgetown and around the MCI Center and Washington Convention Center.

Meter readers write most violation tickets, but Metropolitan Police officers, U.S. Park Police officers and some private security officers also can write tickets. The fine for parking at an expired meter is $25; illegal parking in rush-hour zones costs $100.