We used to have meter readers (people) in the 90's. I remember having to shovel paths for them through the snow.

They send someone every month here. A guy comes down the street looking at all the meters (they are under metal plates in front yards) and putting info into a phone. I guess the city has an app. He has a metal pry bar with a long handle he uses to open them

Yes, you get billed for water just like electricity and gas. Depending where you live it could be a bill every 3-6 months, or monthly. The western US is has a lot of desert and water is much more expensive than in wetter areas. Their bills are typically higher and more heavily tracked. If you have a leak you wouldn’t know for a couple months, having that happen in a water scarce area would be less than ideal for a customer.

They send someone around every month to check the water meter? That’s crazy. Why would they do that?

I remember thinking the exact same thing, just the other way around, when I moved to the UK. I went from a country that measured what you used and billed you for it, to a country that just kinda went "oh, you're a family of 3? We'll charge you for... I dunno, like this much water? How's that sound?"

In the US, water is often supplied by the city, and there isn't really a "flat fee" like in the Netherlands (I'm just assuming we're both Dutch, since I've never seen a non Dutch feddit.nl user).

In the Netherlands we pay something like 100 euros plus 1 euro per liter, and a fixed price for sewage based on inhabitants.

The the US, payment for metered water are without a fixed fee or with a very low one. In Seattle you something like 25 USD, plus ~6 USD per 100 cubic feet, (2.25 per cubic meter). But you also pay something like 18 USD per 100cubic feet of water in sewerage costs. So really, your water bill is around 8 bucks per cubic meter.

And many cities in warmer places have winter and summer pricing for water and sewage. So for a 3 person household using between 50% and 150% of average, that's between 40 and 100 USD per month depending on use.

For a Dutch household, the bill for that same household would vary between 5 and 13 euros per month, since the rest is flat. So nobody really cares if you're off by 25%.

Yep. My dad used to manage a water utility in the 90s, right around the time that they were experimenting with different means of monitoring flow for billing.

The way they had been doing it for decades was by sending a person to literally, physically open every meter well (using a special wrench that opened the five-sided nut closing the well, in an effort to prevent homeowners from tampering with it) and reading the meter usage visually each month, writing the amount down on a paper sheet that would then be manually entered into a billing program on the computer later.

That was supplanted by a version with a very short range radio transmitter. The reader would tap the cover with a probe, and the probe handle would display the value, which was again written on a paper sheet. This got rid of the need to physically open every well, but as I remember it never actually rolled out to every customer even in the entire company before the next version: a slightly longer range transmitter that the reader could scan without leaving the truck. But again, the value was written on paper and input manually.

My dad changed jobs before they upgraded that one so that it saved the value to internal memory, allowing a reader to just drive past every customer's house and read every meter without stopping. My understanding is that that version was eventually replaced with something more like the one in OP's image, which would transmit the value back to the billing office and generate a bill automatically without needing anyone to even come within range of it or see the number at all.

Though, that said, once I became a homeowner, I've noticed meter readers physically opening the meter well and visually inspecting it. I don't see any way they could possibly be actually recording the number (they don't get nearly close enough), so I have to assume they're using a different method to get the number and just performing visual checks to make sure the meter isn't tampered with.

Same here, not in NL.

We do had somebody come check when we contacted them because we were paying too much. (After which we received 1300 euro back because we definitely were)

Nowadays most people in my country have the required "smart meter" now though.