By BERNARD ORSMAN
Auckland City has spent $700,000 upgrading car park ticketing machines that refuse to accept plastic banknotes.
The threat of the Y2K bug led the council to buy the latest technology from Switzerland so motorists could get in and out of the Downtown and Victoria St car parks on New
Year's Day.
But the effort to take account of one problem led to a new one. Automatic payment machines, installed before the new $5 and $10 banknotes were released in October, do not recognise the plastic money.
Car park patrons wanting to use the machines have found messages attached to them apologising and saying the devices cannot accept the banknotes.
Patrons must trundle off to nearby cashier offices to pay their car park fees.
At the Downtown car park, the machines are working for coins and the old banknotes, which is more than can be said for the Victoria St car park. There, the machines sit idle. Motorists must pay at the cashier's office.
Al Wells, an Englishman living in Auckland, tried yesterday to use a plastic $20 note in one of the new machines at the Downtown car park.
"It's pretty dumb, isn't it. They [the council] have put in the latest technology and it doesn't accept legal tender."
A regular car park patron, Rex de Bruyn, said it was ridiculous the machines could not do their job. Anyway, it was quicker to use a cashier, he said.
The council director of enterprise services, Bob Wakelin, said he appreciated the difficulty the machinery was causing people but the council was doing everything to fix it.
He said the council's specifications for the machinery had included the new banknotes and it was unhappy when the problem arose.
A spokesman for the contractors, Aden Automation, said the Swiss company that provided the technology was writing software to recognise the notes.
