City Council Meeting
April 29, 2025
Responses to City Council Agenda Questions
5:30pm Special Meeting – Item 4a.
1. Update on T2 and their responsiveness to kiosk malfunctions. I am incredulous that an installation of 82 meters (less if we remove from El Camino) would in the normal course of business require a full-time person just to remedy technical issues. I will need to know from T2 if this is normal with the meters they’ve sold to other municipalities, and if it’s normal in the industry to require this exceedingly high level of constant maintenance just to keep the meters running. Have we reached out to our neighboring cities that have meters to see if their meters require this level of support?
RESPONSE: Staff has discussed the maintenance of kiosks with several cities and they all have city staff or contracted staff tasked with daily monitoring of issues related to their meter/kiosks. For example, the City of Glendale, CA has 55 kiosks and five full-time employees who monitor, repair, and replace kiosks daily. In San Mateo, as another example, the city contracts with a third party to provide this assistance. Our current contract with LAZ only provides for basic maintenance, such as changing out receipt paper and collecting the coins from the machines.
While San Bruno had hoped these would be “set up and go” with little maintenance, they need more care and attention than initially thought. Technical assistance ranges from replacement of internal parts/components, recalibrating existing components, and/or rebooting the machine itself, sometimes in concert with T2 staff by phone or email.
As cities adopt increasingly complex digital infrastructure as part of broader "Smart City" initiatives, the ongoing need for robust technical support is often underestimated. Modern kiosks and similar systems integrate software, hardware, wireless communication modules, sensors, and cloud-based services, each requiring specialized operational support to ensure reliability and uptime. Without dedicated maintenance and operations (M&O) resources, issues such as firmware updates, cybersecurity patches, hardware degradation, and system integrations can lead to recurring service disruptions. Industry best practices recognize that lifecycle management, including proactive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and technical troubleshooting, is critical to sustaining these systems' performance levels and protecting the City's investment over time.
The increasingly complex technical support demands outlined above have contributed to the challenges the City is now facing with kiosk performance. Without a higher technical level of daily support minor system issues have escalated into visible service failures and undermining public confidence. In the eyes of the community, frequent kiosk outages are perceived as a failure of the system as a whole, regardless of the technical complexity and isolated issues behind the scenes.
Responses to City Council Agenda Packet Questions
April 29, 2025
2 To protect the City’s reputation and the success of digital infrastructure investments, it is critical to recognize and plan for the full lifecycle support requirements of Smart City technologies.
2. Make kiosks display FREE on all City holidays. I am equally incredulous that the welcome screen is not programmable. This makes no sense, because the message that is displayed obviously was put there by a human person who knows what our parking hours are and typed in the message that is currently displayed. It is not necessary to reprogram the machine to not allow folks to get beyond the welcome screen on holidays; if the welcome message simply says “parking is free today”, most people will get the message and walk away happy. If the user ignores the message and gets all the way through the steps and then told a second time parking is free, that’s acceptable. I think a sticker with a long list of holidays is not going to be nearly as effective as a simple message on the welcome screen displayed on holidays. I will also reiterate that when the parking program was presented to us originally, our former chief used the specific example of being able to program a special welcome message on a special event day that said “parking is free today courtesy of the City Of San Bruno.” Do meters in other municipalities that have T2 meters also make their customers enter their license plate before telling them that parking is free?
RESPONSE: The machines have already been programmed for the City holidays systemwide.
However, the functionality still requires the user to punch in the license plate before the FREE holiday message pops up on the screen and limits the ability for the user to pay.
T2 reported to the City that to have the “FREE message” be displayed on the screen for each holiday ahead of the license plate requires someone to physically re-program the home screen for the different zones manually on the day of the holiday and then re-program each zone after midnight of the holiday due to limitations in the programming. The programming message changes either have to be sent remotely or physically to each machine for the message to appear to the user and then be de-programmed at the end of the day. Additionally Staff must also be onsite with thumb drives to ensure all meters received the remote programming both at the beginning and the end of the day Staff did not pursue it any further because we do not have available staff time currently on staff and this is not the design of the system However, the T2 Vice President of Municipal Sales and the engineer who has completed most of the repairs in San Bruno will be at the Council meeting and can better explain the technical limitations related to messages on the display panel of the kiosk.
3. Analyze elimination of paid parking during certain hours of the day and Sundays. I assume that, since we have the revenue numbers for the different time periods, that we could also derive the average parking occupancy percentage for those same time periods. Assuming yes, I would like to see those numbers brought to the meeting. I said repeatedly in the January meeting that the decision whether or not to charge for parking at certain times or days should Responses to City Council Agenda Packet Questions
April 29, 2025
3 not be a function of how much revenue could be collected, but whether it would achieve the goals of the parking program, which is to strive for 85% occupancy. If the occupancy from 8 AM to 10 AM is significantly lower than 85%, that is a reason to consider not charging for parking during that period.
RESPONSE: Because the kiosk meters have experienced different levels of malfunctions on and off over the past year, including early issues with the solar batteries, coin chutes not correctly reading or registering the dollar amount of the coins inserted, coin chute jams on a regular basis, and credit card readers going down due to tampering and/or other malfunctions, staff believes the data collected to date is not complete for the months that many of the kiosks were not working correctly. Regardless, utilization remains on average 80 percent+ as reported by PD staff and LAZ by visual counts and anecdotally by some of the merchants.
Staff is working with the various vendors associated with the different sources of data to determine the best way to leverage the data to create the best interpretation of the data. Additionally, LAZ has been using the ALPR systems on different days and hours to check usage of the streets/lots, however that is also subject to manipulation and interpretation by expert analysis.
Finally, any loss of revenue by eliminating paid parking will impact the overall financials of the paid parking program and will require an increase in the rates for the other hours of the day. It’s important to note that any significant change in the parking rates/times/structure should be re- analyzed by a consultant with expertise in the field as that is how we first came to finalize this rate/payment structure to support the program and the four-year amortization.
3. Syncing paid parking time limits at street parking kiosks and parking lots. So, was any additional analysis done on this point? The staff report seems to reiterate the discussion from the January meeting without any new analysis. For example, we discussed potentially piloting a section of green painted short-term spaces with a dedicated green painted meter for those spaces.
RESPONSE: Staff will include the table below at the Council meeting tonight to illustrate by time periods for both the lots and the kiosks. The chart shows the breakdown of the revenues by time of day. The chart identifies the meter and citation revenues by time of day and Sundays. Please note that this historical revenue generation is not a reliable indicator of future revenue as we expect it to increase once the kiosks pay systems become more reliable.
It is difficult to uncouple the lots from the street parking lot as the program's premise built the program on the rates driving longer-term people to the lots for quicker turnover on the street.
Elimination of any of the enforcement requires making up for those revenues to ensure the financial viability of the entire paid parking program. Should a time period or day of the week be Responses to City Council Agenda Packet Questions
April 29, 2025
4 eliminated, staff will recommend a corresponding parking rate increase for the street and lot parking.
Concerning painted green zones, the Council may recall that this was resolved by adding a 20- minute parking option to the kiosks. The existing painted green zones are monitored and ticketed for overstaying the 24-minute time limit. Essentially, additional green zones are unnecessary because the quick vehicle turnover is achieved with the shorter kiosk rates. Should the Council wish to add a green zone to a particular location, that may be directed at the Council meeting. It should also be understood that enforcement of the green zones would not reliably be every 24 minutes as the current paid parking enforcement downtown is kiosk driven and there is no way to routinely enforce the 24-minute zones with the diversification of enforcement efforts currently underway.
April 2024 to March 2025
TIME PERIOD STREET STREET LOT LOT TOTAL
Meter Citations Meter Citations
8AM – 10AM 44,971 36,850 45,372 3,250 130,442
10AM – NOON 78,113 63,600 34,052 14,850 190,614
NOON – 2PM 92,096 112,050 37,217 23,850 265,213
2PM – 4PM 73,756 88,250 32,926 14,900 209,832
4PM – 6PM 93,804 95,850 24,155 9,300 223,109
6PM – 8PM 54,336 51,950 -- -- 106,286
SUNDAYS * 68,400 * 30,850 99,250
TOTAL $ 437,075 $ 516,950 $ 173,721 $ 97,000 $1,224,746