Officials in Hamtramck and Royal Oak are betting that a new style of high-tech parking meters — with built-in forgiveness — will ease the stress of parking for diners and shoppers in their downtowns.

The new Sentry Smart Meters offer many more ways to pay than old-style coin-only meters, although other high-tech meters have almost as many payment options.

What sets these apart are features to make it easy to find an open space and much easier to avoid a ticket. For starters, Sentry meters let you park for five minutes free, with no worry of getting cited — a gimmick aimed right at hungry drivers making runs for takeout.

Another feature lets a motorist plug the meter, either with coins or a credit card, and still avoid a ticket even if time expires before the driver returns. Instead, the meter flashes red. If the motorist pays up, it turns green, the signal to drive off worry-free.

What drivers can’t do is stiff a Sentry meter. Once someone parks, the system records the vehicle’s license plate number, including whether it’s eligible to use a handicap space. Those who stiff the system won’t get old-school parking tickets on their windshields, the kind notorious for disappearing in the wind or getting soaked by rain. Instead, a ticket will arrive via the U.S. mail.

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Traditional downtowns like Hamtramck and Royal Oak, where parking gets scarce at busy times, saw their vitality drained in the 1960s as shopping malls began proliferating with vistas of free parking, urban planners said. 

After malls declined, the lure of free parking leapfrogged to new strip malls and shopping centers. To sustain traditional, walkable downtowns that require paid parking, convenience is essential, said John Bry, program coordinator for Main Street Oakland County, which offers assistance to the older downtowns and shopping corridors of Oakland County.

“Parking in traditional downtowns gets a bad rap sometimes. Systems like these new ones in Royal Oak and Hamtramck can beat back that image,” Bry said.

“It’s really interesting to hear about the added perks that can make parking easier,” he said.

Hamtramck started installing Sentry meters six months ago and they’ve been operating for two months, Hamtramck City Manager Kathy Angerer said.

“With any new things, there are complaints. But I get reports on this every day. So far, most people like it,” she said. Why?

“Let’s say you stayed too long talking to a clerk or there was a long line at the bakery. You come back to your car late and, in the old days, you could get a citation. With this system, it will be blinking and telling you, ‘Hey, you need to put more money in.’

“So you do that and, no ticket,” Angerer said.

Before choosing the new system, Hamtramck had numerous broken and missing meters, leading some motorists to leave vehicles in parking spaces “for hours or days at a time,” she said. That kept shoppers and diners from finding parking spots, hurting downtown businesses, Angerer said.

Royal Oak has long had a downtown rife with parking stress, Chief of Police Corrigan O’Donohue said. Visitors typically circled a block while seeking a parking space, then took their chances with the city’s small army of parking enforcers, who were quick to write tickets.

“We decided we wanted the customer experience to be better,” O’Donohue said.

This fall, following months of public meetings and surveys, the city is installing Sentry Smart Meters with the goal of having most of the system in place for holiday visitors, said O’Donohue, who also is Royal Oak’s assistant city manager.

The new meters look nothing like standard parking meters. Instead, the units installed at spaces are mere posts topped with electronics, so they’re called bollards. You pay at a nearby kiosk, not at the bollard by your car. The kiosks are designed to be easy to read, in any light and any weather.

“Previously, if you used reading glasses or had bad night vision or you were too short, you couldn’t read a lot of our old meters,” O’Donohue said. As for the bollards, each one blinks in three colors, he said.

If it flashes green, “You’re paid up.” Red? “You need to pay.” But white? That space is available, “and you can see them blinking from down the street,” O’Donohue said. A driver can see all of the spaces available at a given moment by logging onto Royal Oak’s new parking app on a smartphone.

As in Hamtramck, Royal Oak’s experience with old-fashioned parking meters revealed widespread abuse.

“What we found was, less than half the people who park pay for it,” O’Donohue said. "We tested this on Main Street for a month."

Enforcing the rules with old-style meters required numerous enforcers and the volume of tickets simply made motorists mad. The new system aims to be fair and less stressful. 

“If you sign up through the app, you can register your license plate and preload money,” O’Donohue said. "The bollard turns green when it recognizes you. I have two teenage boys in my home. I preload their license plates, so when they come down to Royal Oak, I don’t have to worry about them getting a ticket."

Royal Oak’s system, like Hamtramck’s, will have a five-minute grace period for sprinting shoppers and takeout purchasers.

“If you run in and run out, you’re free,” he said.

As with any change in the spectrum of public services, online trolls have lambasted Sentry meters. Among those who already condemned Royal Oak’s system, months before its installation, was a man who declared that the city would surely pay $6,000 to equip each of its 800 downtown spaces, an investment of nearly $5 million. O’Donohue said the city’s actual cost is nothing.

“We don’t pay any initial capital cost," he said. "The manufacturer puts these in and then they get a portion of the parking fees. And because they own the system, we don’t have to maintain it. They do."

With the new meters, Royal Oak will keep its two-hour limit for on-street parking in the downtown, and it will continue giving the first two hours free in any of its parking decks, including the new one on 11 Mile just west of Main Street. The city’s parking lots have been free for the last year while officials decided on what system to install, “so that’s going to be a surprise to people when we start charging for those spaces again,” Royal Oak Police Lt. Keith Spencer said.

As for explaining how the Sentry meters work, Royal Oak Community Engagement Specialist Judy Davids has an answer: “We have ambassadors out, talking to anyone who looks confused, but once you’ve done it, it’s really easy.”

Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com