The City of Corpus Christi, Texas, aims to reduce its waste and make its streets friendlier by installing solar-powered parking meters that accept credit cards.

The southern coastal town in Texas is not the first city to go solar with its parking meters. In fact, the city is following in the footsteps of several larger metropolises in Texas, said Corpus Christi parking control supervisor Marc Denson.

Dallas, Austin and Houston have all installed at least some of the new parking meters fitted with small solar photovoltaic panels that provide almost all of the energy the little meters need.

“Being on the Ocean here, we’re really aware of how much trash we produce,” Denson said. “And we’ve been making a lot of recycling efforts.”

The city recently instituted a major recycling initiative that has significantly cut back on the trash headed to landfills.

The city has 962 parking meters, Denson said. Of those, about half are more than 50 years old.

“The others go through batteries like crazy,” Denson said.

He has to properly dispose of more than 2,000 batteries a year, he said. If he were to upgrade the old meters to the newer ones the city already uses, he would have to throw away almost 5,000 batteries a year.

“That’s a lot of batteries,” he said. “That’s a lot of trash.”

The solar-powered meters, on the other hand, only need to have their batteries replaced once every three years.

“That’s a big reduction,” he said.

The batteries are also rechargeable, and in three years the battery technology may have improved so they will last even longer.

In most cases, the solar-powered meters get all of the energy they need from the sun and simply store energy in their batteries for night use and shady or cloudy times. Since most cities don’t use meters at night, the batteries get little use, according to information about the meters.

“People don’t carry change with them anymore,” Denson said. “So they end up getting tickets.”

Because the new solar-powered parking meters accept credit cards, they have been shown to cut down on parking citations by 30 to 35 percent, Denson said.

The city installed 30 meters this week for a 90-day trial before switching all the meters in the city out, Denson said.

Image courtesy of Mark Houston Recovery.