There’s no love for parking meters, although they can help to ease parking crunches. There is no further upside, and it will remain so until the day when a daring municipality takes a cue from slot machines and dispenses an occasional jackpot to lucky drivers.

Short of that unlikely dream, the best one can hope for from parking meters is that they work with precision; there is little more annoying than a balky meter that grabs your money and malfunctions, leading to an unfair parking ticket. There’s been a string of such reports through the years in Woodstock, a Vermont destination town that has every reason to treat visitors with kid gloves. Town officials say reports of rogue meters in the village have overstated the problem, but then there are the disgruntled parkers who say they’ve been shortchanged and will never set their foot — or credit card — in Woodstock again. Occasional writers to the Forum in this newspaper have been among the aggrieved, including Sonja Hakala of West Hartford, who got literary revenge by including a Woodstock parking meter incident in her latest novel. The scene was based on real life.

Parking meter outrage is so powerful that it could be worthy of further study: Why is that mechanical coin-taking devices, from parking meters to vending machines, so inflame the passions of users when they fail and take your coins? Even when there’s little at stake, it seems to matter so much.

In any case, more placid days may be around the corner in Woodstock, because Village Trustees have wisely voted to replace the oft-criticized coin-operated meters with solar-powered ones that accept coins and swipe cards. The fee is jumping to $1 an hour from 50 cents, but that may be well worth it if parkers get their money’s worth — every penny and every minute.

Shop owner Jeffrey Kahn, who chaired a committee that came up with a plan to hire a California company to install new meters as early as this fall, told staff writer Matt Hongoltz-Hetling that they would be cost-neutral or slightly profitable. If they produce a surplus, it would be applied to the parking program.

The parking committee recognized that the root of the problem may not be shoppers, but those who work in the village. It has been a longstanding problem in many locales that workers in crowded business districts fail to recognize that their self-interest is best served by walking a couple of blocks and leaving prime spots for customers. Woodstock is taking several measures to encourage workers to do that, and Kahn said that if they work, it could be that Woodstock will someday need no meters at all.

That would be a best-case scenario — good for visitors, business and domestic tranquility.