If Americans write "meters" instead of "metres" (the street is 300 meters long), how do they write "meters" as in parking meters?

Taste

Context I suppose. There are a multitude of such words in all forms of English. Apparently they are called homonyms.

Context.

Your premise is inaccurate - they aren’t “the same thing.” They are the same WORD, but that’s not “the same thing.” (One is a device to collect coins as a fee to park your vehicle, the other is a form of measurement.)
As someone mentioned, they are homonyms - two words that sound the same, but which have different meanings. (Homonyms may be spelled differently: e.g., “Pair” and “Pear”)
In addition, they are homographs, meaning that they are spelled the same but have different meanings. (Homographs may be pronounced differently: e.g., “ADDress” meaning a location, and “adDRESS” meaning to speak to a person or topic)
Other examples of homographic homonyms include:
Air - oxygen / a lilting tune.
Arm - body part / division of a company.
Band - a musical group / a ring.
Bark - a tree's out layer / the sound a dog makes.
Bat - an implement used to hit a ball / a nocturnal flying mammal

Thanks for asking!

the same way we don't need to use a y in tires to distinguish from round wheelie bits and getting fatigued.

Context, if I read parking is too expensive I wish they did not have these meters here. I do not think distance.

Each of the parking meters are 9 meters apart.

Well meterphorically speaking, America is the world leader, they can do anything they want.

parking meters they spell as meters
distance metres they spell as yards

That's why we use feet and yards insted of meters🤷‍♂️

They can only go by context, but respecting other country's languages - such as French - and understanding etymology are not their strong points!

I have a book on the basics of "CAD" (Computer-Aided Draughting - of technical drawings) and was annoyed to find it spells "metre" as "meter" despite being by a British author and publisher, albeit printed in Malaysia.

We distinguish it by context

Yes we are all just wrong because we were here years ago to create the language.

How about parking stall bandits????

As the others have said, context. Same way one knows the difference between tree bark vs. a dog’s bark. A wound (injury) vs. the past participle of wind—and for that matter, to wind one’s watch, vs. the wind blowing outside, to blow one’s horn vs, the “low blow”. And so on. 🙂