Paying for Parking through an APP. A Eureka Moment.

They have a similar app in Philadelphia, it's called meterUP, you can pay your meter by phone. The app can send you a notification when your meter is about to expire. The ticket writers still have to circle the block though, they need to enter your plate number in there ticket machine to see if you paid by the meterUP app.

http://www.philapark.org/2017/12/meterup-phillys-new-convien...

Philly has also done away with meters in some parts of the city, installing kiosks instead, you can pay by coins, bills or credit cards, at the kiosk you get a printed paid receipt that you place on your dashboard. The ticker writer looks at the receipt to see if you're expired.

https://youtu.be/zH6S5Te96MY

https://www.visitphilly.com/parking/

There was a news report one day that some of the printed receipts were turning black and unreadable. I didn't listen to the whole report but my guess was some kind of thermal printing paper baking in the sun.

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Toronto also has a system similar to Philly. On the plus side, if your time is about to expire, you can extend from your phone...

http://mobilepay.greenp.com/

Northern AZ has added meters in parts of Sedona and Flagstaff. Payment can be made by credit card at a kiosk, through an app and I think you can somehow prepay with cash at an office. In Flagstaff, the app adds a service fee of 35 cents (or maybe 35 cents/hr?) to the dollar/hour parking fee so I've never installed the app. As I see it, the primary perk of the app is the ability to extend the paid time through the app if you're running late.

I read that in Sedona, the program started with a bit of confusion where parkers either weren't thinking or thought they were paying for a particular space, not a license plate #. They entered a gibberish plate number at the kiosk and several learned the hard way not to do that when they received a ticket.

I'm not sure about the app, but at the kiosk, it's possible to pay fines as well as pay for parking. Flagstaff's kiosks are pretty spiffy as they're conveniently located throughout the paid parking areas and they're solar-powered.

Why stop there? Have the app generate the tickets and bill our credit card for the violation.

Due process requires, at a minimum, that a ticket can't be issued unless the enforcing agency verifies that the "offending" vehicle is (illegally) parked.

I liked the observation by soberbyker that the parking app can notify you when your time is about to expire. That is a really great feature. Avoids having to race back to move your car or feed the meter.

I first saw this in Israel where you can pay street parking with an App, this service works in any city or town that has contracted with Pango and the money they collect gets distributed to each municipality without the government having to expend money on meters or meter maids, all they need is two cans of paints blue and white to paint the curb where the service is allowed.

https://en.pango.co.il/services/parking/parking-locator/inst...

the app should be able to tell you where a parking spot is open

My phone does not have enough memory to accommodate all these apps. I installed an additional memory card, but most apps are written so that they can only be installed in the phone's main memory.

Sadly, this is true even for the expensive phones ... I just don't like the intrusion and privacy issues of all these apps ... just a Luddite, I guess

CC

Great idea, never thought of that. That would have saved time instead of spending time having to search for parking.

That would have been a valuable feature while we were touristing in Florida. The tourist spots tend to be congested, which makes finding parking a challenge.

... but it's for parking lots, not on street parking, which are usually a lot more expensive. You can find, pay and reserve a spot.

https://spothero.com/philadelphia-parking

The Garmin Smartphone Link app has an app (sub-app?) called:

Dynamic Parking

This new feature helps you locate parking areas close to your destination. For some commercial garages, it also provides you with the number of spots available and the current cost of the parking spot. Covered are 42 major metropolitan areas and 79 airports in North America with details about the garage, including addresses, phone number, capacities, size regulations and prices (early-bird, evening, holiday, specials, etc.).

I've never used it. Has anyone tried it who can offer a review?

Each on-street parking spot, where you could use the app to pay for it, was numbered in Miami.

We don't have a smartphone, but we were able to use a desktop computer to use a form of "Dynamic Parking" to reserve a parking spot at the Atlanta (ATL) airport.

See: https://spothero.com/

This service could easily be adapted, it hasn't been already, for the smart phone. It did make parking at ATL very simple.

The downside. When we went to check-out of the hotel's parking lot, the instructions were wrong. Then - we contacted the front desk. The person responding never heard of spotheoro!!!! The hotel front desk did some scrambling to figure stuff out and they let us leave. We left as fast as we could.

Already in use in some places in California. No apps needed. Just enter our phone number when purchasing parking permit at the pay booth. We'll get a text message when it is about to expire and have an option to extend by replying the text message. Specify the number of minutes to purchase in the reply.

Luddites have to do it the all fashion way, carry enough change and feed the meter

I could never understand...in NYC, you cannot "feed" the meters, i.e. 2 hours, means 2 hours, and not 2 hours, then add more time. I even wondered further--real scenario--we used up the time, and there was a space empty in front. should I move up? If I do, how will the parking person know I really did move and I'm not in the same space? My wife said don't bother, I didn't, and I just added more time, nothing happened.

In Philly, I specifically asked a PPA person, am I allowed to add time, and was told yes.

Then, I had always heard about "chalking" the tires, so that if a parking person came back around and saw a mark, they know you have been there since x o'clock.

In the real world when there are rules, obviously, more info is better than less, so yes, it would seem a parking app is in the favor of the house, as far as customers adhering to rules...

Meter maid idles by in a car equipped with cameras that reads license plates. When their computer screen lights up, they print and pull the ticket off of it. After leaving it on the windshield, they're off to the next one.

I saw that on CSI a long time ago, I thought it was sci-fi. Next thing I know, cruisers in my town (small) have them mounted on the trunk lids.

Any type of technology that requires a subscription, imho, is genius. Everything does seem to be going that way with the cloud...

I'm also interested...

My understanding though is that you need a model 51/61 Drive series or better for parking support (either Live Parking (Android only?) or Dynamic Off-Street Parking (Android /iOS)). This was announced in 2017 and is based on Parkopedia.

The Dynamic Parking you refer to was introduced in 2012 and doesn't seem to exist anymore in the Smartphone Link app.

My DriveAssist 50 doesn't have the parking support so I use the Parkopedia app on my phone to find parking near my destination

Based on some of your posting I'm going to assume you live in Pennsylvania. Last year PA did away with the requirement to have an expiration sticker on the license plate, (you still register yearly just no more sticker) part of the law that did that also gave police departments an opportunity to get a grant to buy the license plate readers (LPR) so they can automatically tell if you're plate has expired, among other things like if the car was stolen. The LPRs are popping up all over the state, probably how your small town got theirs. If you ever watched the show "Parking Wars" you saw that the Philadelphia Parking Authority has been using them for years.

This video explains how they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COBClFEQQJk

My DriveSmart 61 LMT-S has the feature, I have yet to give it a whirl but if I do someday I'll report back on what I thought about it.