‘It’s just really strange’: Who is beheading the parking meters of St. John’s?
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — In Washington, D.C., it was the fabled meter massacre back in the mid-1990s. In 2012, a man from the Bronx was accused of using super glue to thwart paid parking. In Chicago, irate drivers clogged coin slots with expanding foam when fees were hiked in 2009.
But now someone — or some people — is vandalizing coin and card-reading meters in St. John’s, N.L., at a truly staggering rate, according to the company that supplies them.
“They’ve never seen anything like the vandalism and theft of parking meter heads that we’ve experienced here,” St. John’s Mayor Danny Breen said of J.J. MacKay Canada Ltd. — the New Glasgow, N.S.-based company that serves 1,000 municipalities.
It appears the weapons of choice were baseball bats and sledge hammers to beat the heads off most of the city’s 1,167 parking machines since they were installed four years ago for about $474 apiece.