About 80 of the Dunedin City Council's parking meters also struggled to keep track of time for several days in April, printing the wrong time on tickets and gifting free parking as a result.
About 80 of the city's older parking meters began malfunctioning when the rest of the city's clocks went back an hour at the end of daylight saving on April 4, council Citifleet team leader Brent Bachop said yesterday.
A glitch in computer software used to remotely manage the meters' clocks - running on a server inside the council's Civic Centre office - meant the clocks continued to revert to daylight saving time daily at midnight, he said.
Motorists encountering one of the malfunctioning machines received double their allocation of parking time.
One motorist who paid $1 for an hour's parking near Dunedin Hospital at 12.13pm told the Otago Daily Times she received a ticket telling her she had paid at 1.13pm, and could therefore park until 2.13pm.
Mr Bachop said the fault was caused by software designed for use in the northern hemisphere, but any loss of income would be "probably very, very small" and no action would be taken.
"It's just one of those things - a technical glitch that happens from time to time," he said.
The Easter holiday break meant the software glitch was not fixed until April 7, so the council's parking staff had to manually adjust the 80 machines' clocks before 9am each day for several days, he said.
Any machines giving tickets with incorrect times must have been missed on certain days, he said.
Two of the meters continued to malfunction after the software was fixed, and continued to receive daily tweaks until replacement parts arrived from Auckland on Wednesday, he said.
