After a rare system-wide outage, Hartford’s parking chief said Thursday that the city’s 254 electronic parking kiosks are working again.
Eric Boone, CEO of the Hartford Parking Authority, said the city’s kiosks began working again just after 1 p.m. Thursday. They had been down since sometime Wednesday evening, when motorists aren’t required to pay to park in city spaces.
Calls to the authority began coming after 8 a.m. Thursday, when parking enforcement takes effect. When officials realized it was a system-wide problem, they called parking contractor Parkeon, and learned that a similar problem had happened in some of the New Jersey company’s other cities, including Nashville, Tenn., according to Boone.
“I issued out to staff and called [Hartford Police] to let them know we wouldn’t enforce time citations,” Boone said.
Boone said the outage is the first of its kind since the city installed the credit-card-accepting meters in 2008.
Parkeon, headquartered in New Jersey, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.
Boone said he expects to learn more about the outage in the coming days, but he said there’s no reason to think security was compromised.
Parking enforcement personnel stopped ticketing for the remainder of the day Thursday.
If any tickets were issued during the outage, Boone said they would be canceled.
