Wellington City Council is updating the city’s parking meter system with new Pay by Plate meters. Pay by Plate is a paperless system that uses your vehicle licence plate number, rather than a numbered car park, to record your parking time and payment. Parking fees will stay the same.

The new meter system is part of the Council’s city planning and transformation work.

James Roberts, the Council’s Chief Operating Officer, says: “The city’s existing parking meters and sensors are near their end of life. It’s time to update with new technology, that’s easy to use, that enables us to manage parking fairly and efficiently, and that can adapt to future changes to our city streets.

“We want to ensure fair access to the parking spaces available, while supporting active and public modes of transport, that’s essential to keep our growing city moving.”

“We’re pleased the new meters also offer the choice of English or te reo Māori instructions. We’re supporting the Council’s commitment for Pōneke to become a bilingual city.”

Pay by Plate is easy to use and works like the systems already in Lower Hutt, Porirua, Auckland, and Dunedin. There’ll be a mixture of card-only meters and card + coin meters. Meters will be placed within the line of sight of any park, and alongside all mobility parking spaces.

At the moment, nearly a third of payments are made via the PayMyPark app. Fans of the app will be pleased to know they’ll still be able to use the PayMyPark app to pay for parking.

The new Pay by Plate meters will start being installed across the city centre from late September. The meters will be switched on and ‘live’ from early January 2024.

More information

§ For more on Pay by Plate see: wellington.govt.nz/pay-by-plate

§ For the Council’s Parking Policy: wellington.govt.nz/parking-policy

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