We were all so busy revisiting Y2K anxiety, we forgot to pay attention to the computer glitch right in front of us: parking meters around the city have been malfunctioning since the start of the new year due to a software end date of January 1st, 2020. In other words: it's Y2K20 time.
The Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards. But this is actually a global problem stretching all the way to Australia, as there are tons of cities around the world that use the same software: "The outage was caused by a configuration error in the credit-card payment software used by Parkeon, a vendor for automated parking systems around the world," the DOT wrote. "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. Cities worldwide using the same meters/software began seeing a series of cascading credit card rejections, starting in Australia, as the calendar reached that date."
DOT crews are now in the field reconfiguring the software at individual meters—the Times notes the city has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces, so it may take a little while longer to fix.
However, parking meters are still accepting coins, and the ParkNYC app is still working if you want to use credit cards. We've contacted the DOT to ask whether there will be any grace period given to parkers during this outage, and what will happen to people who have already been ticketed who didn't know about the error.
As someone pointed out on Twitter, this isn't the first time in the recent past that there was a major NYC tech problem caused by a failure to update or program software.
