RVR Parking Update

[Big Iron]

I'm hoping this is not old news and the search function didn't turn up anything recent so here goes

The parking attendant is no longer there, the booth is vacant and the ticket machine covered with a plastic bag. There is a machine in the Station where you purchase parking which now means debit/credit is an option. Parking is $5.00/day. The first 3 hours is free. You enter your license plate and cell phone # and some other info then it spits out a ticket that you have to take back out to the car to display in the windshield so your rig doesn't get towed. We received a txt message about 3 hours before the the parking expired advising us of pending expiration.

The parking lot was almost full but there were about 20 spots available at 2:00 on a Friday afternoon. The new(ish) stoplight at the entrance makes it alot easier to make the left out of the station.

 

[xyzzy]

Unfortunate if the former attendants lost their jobs and couldn't find other work, but this sounds like an improvement. It will also eliminate the logjam of people leaving the station after the arrival of a train.

 

[Anderson]

I noticed this last weekend when I went to take the Meteor to NYP. Honestly, it's an improvement in so many ways...it could often take as much as half an hour to "clear the lot" from a big train coming in, between the sheer mass of people leaving and the fact that folks got blocked in by traffic. If you had a lot of inbound traffic for another train at the same time, the lot got to be a zoo.

It probably saves someone $60-100k/yr, too (8760 hrs/yr@$8/hr is $70,080) net of machine upkeep. Biggest issue is that I got my "add more money" text about ten minutes prior to expiration at around 0400...there needs to be a way to set that to come at a sane hour, since most folks aren't up at hours like that.

Credit/debit was already an option before for a while.

 

[Big Iron]

I noticed this last weekend when I went to take the Meteor to NYP. Honestly, it's an improvement in so many ways...it could often take as much as half an hour to "clear the lot" from a big train coming in, between the sheer mass of people leaving and the fact that folks got blocked in by traffic. If you had a lot of inbound traffic for another train at the same time, the lot got to be a zoo.

It probably saves someone $60-100k/yr, too (8760 hrs/yr@$8/hr is $70,080) net of machine upkeep. Biggest issue is that I got my "add more money" text about ten minutes prior to expiration at around 0400...there needs to be a way to set that to come at a sane hour, since most folks aren't up at hours like that.

Credit/debit was already an option before for a while.

Regarding traffic and leaving the station. I didn't even touch the brakes. Out in a flash. Huge improvement removing the logjam plus the benefit of the new light. Hopefully the parking attendants were placed in other positions within the company that operates that lot and a bunch of others.