The last coin-operated street parking meter in the City of Westminster was removed in May 2009, and has now entered the collection of the Science Museum in London. The death of parking meters was sealed by the introduction of 'Pay & Display' ticket machines, and more recently by pre-pay, mobile telephone and credit card payment systems. The last five parking meters in Westminster, with a small LCD screen displaying the number of minutes parking time available, were in fact fairly recent successors of mechanical meters (with a pointer that ticked away the minutes), whose strong visual symbolism of the passing of time is a seemingly familiar but now vanished sight on the streets of busy cities.
Jacob Paskins
Jacob Paskins
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