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“No meters, only an app.” For whose convenience?

There’s a pitch that’s been making the rounds of city halls for a few years now. It goes something like this: “Remove the meters. Remove the kiosks. Put everything in an app. Your curb becomes invisible. It becomes modern.” It sounds like the future. It isn’t.

What an app-only curb actually looks like

Strip the hardware off the block and three things happen. First, the sign that says “this is a legal space, here are the rules” disappears. Second, the only path to payment is through a phone — which means a smartphone, a charged battery, a working cell signal, a credit card on file, a downloaded app, and the literacy to use it. Third, the parking rules move from the curb to a screen two menus deep on a device that isn’t yours.

Everyone who can’t jump all four hurdles in the 30 seconds they have at the curb ends up either walking away or parking illegally. That includes tourists, elderly residents, unbanked people, people whose phones just died, people with declined cards and people who simply don’t want to install another app.

“But we’ll take kiosks” — the other half of the pitch

The kiosk-only pitch is the same story with different hardware. Move the decision point from the space to a shared machine down the block. The driver has to walk to the kiosk, decipher the rules, enter a plate, pay and walk back. It’s a transaction tax measured in minutes, paid in small moments of friction by the people who can least afford them. And every missed payment becomes a ticket.

The quiet word: “asset-light”

You’ll hear some vendors describe this model as “asset-light.” That word is doing a lot of work. It means one of two things:

1. The vendor doesn’t own the assets — you do. The hardware is on your balance sheet, or the city is paying a service fee that amortizes it invisibly.
2. The vendor does own them — and they also own the data. Your license-plate reads, your occupancy records, your payment sessions. Your decision-support layer is a product they sell back to you.

Neither of those is inherently wrong. But “asset-light” should never be pitched to an agency as a virtue without a clear answer to two questions: whose balance sheet carries the hardware, and whose hands hold the data?

What “reimagining the curb” should actually mean

A curb designed for everyone has:

• Hardware at the space. A meter, sign, kiosk or pole-mounted display that says this space is legal and here’s what it costs.
• Every payment channel, not just one. Coin, card, contactless, mobile app, pay-by-plate.
• Clear flex spaces. Pickup-dropoff, loading, disabled, resident-permit — marked in the lane and announced at the decision point.
• Enforcement with grace. 5–10-minute grace, evidence on every citation, predictable patrol.
• Open data. Live occupancy published to Google, Waze, Apple and your own wayfinding signs.
• Agency ownership. Your hardware. Your data. Your dashboards. Your policy levers.

That’s not nostalgia for meters. It’s a design spec for a curb that works.

What we’d ask every procurement team to do

Before you take a vendor’s “no meters” pitch at face value, ask them three questions. One: of the last 100 transactions on a comparable block, how many were coin, card and app? Two: for every citation a motorist could receive under your proposal, where does the driver read the rules? Show us the eye path. Three: can the city export every license-plate read, every transaction, every session, at any time, to any BI tool, with no fees and no vendor approval? Get those three answers in writing.

A curb without signals isn’t a simpler curb. It’s a more confusing one, dressed in sleeker words. We’ve been making meters for 90 years. The thing that’s most modern about them isn’t the payment system or the sensor suite. It’s that they still say, clearly and at the decision point: this is a legal space. Here are the rules. Here’s how to comply.

— The CivicSmart team