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The parking meter has been part of our daily lives for fifty years. A worthy successor to the American parking meter, the parking meter is a French invention. Even today, France is the world leader in the sector and supplies devices to the largest cities in the world.
The parking meter has lined the streets of our cities for decades. Useful for some, deterrent for others. “A kind of slot machine in which you do not win“, laughs a man. “It’s good to make it pay so as not to encourage people to have a car in town“says another man. The very first parking meters arrived in France in the 1960s. At the time, it was 1 franc for an hour. “Female auxiliaries”, dressed in burgundy and then blue, were responsible for checking that each motorist had paid to park his car.
Impossible to evoke blue outfits without mentioning Marie Pervenche, a television series from the 1980s. Danielle Evenou embodies a contractual. For fifty years, parking meters have given way to parking meters, a French invention and manufacture. Today, we pay without contact on these machines. The world leader in parking meters, the company employs 1,300 people, more than half of whom are IT specialists.