Posted on: Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Meters out, cell-phone calls in as way to pay for parking spot
By Edward C. Baig
USA Today
Tired of feeding the meter? Dial your cell phone.
Gannett News Service Now, experts expect that more people will dig into their pockets for a phone rather than a quarter to pay for a parking spot. Installations are in place in Europe and in a growing number of North American cities, including Seattle; Vancouver, Canada; and, soon, Minneapolis.
Hard statistics are difficult to come by. But Neil Podmore of Vancouver-based Verrus, which is involved in the pay-by-cell parking technology, estimates about 100,000 spots are being paid for by phone in North America and 250,000 worldwide. Podmore says he thinks the worldwide total will reach 500,000 spaces by year's end.
What's driving the trend: Consumers like the convenience and safety of not having to race back to a parking spot to feed the meter, especially at night. On the other side, parking-lot operators can better manage costs.
Here's how pay-by-cell works: Once an account is set up, a motorist finds a spot, parks the car, calls a toll-free number and keys in the spot's number.
People might actually save money because time doesn't count against them until they pull into a parking place. With other electronic systems, the clock starts ticking once a driver takes a ticket to enter the gate, even if it takes time to find a space.
And if a person is running late, he can remotely buy more parking time with another phone call. The bill is typically sent to a credit card.
At UCSB, students receive a text message on their phones, warning them five minutes before their time is about to expire.
But technology cuts both ways. Those enforcing violations carry personal digital assistants that notify them when the time has run out at a specific parking spot.
"It's a breakthrough advancement in parking technology," says Tom Roberts, director of transportation services at UCSB. "What we've done is not just use parking by cell phone and not just use physical pay stations. But we marry them together, and this is the first place anywhere that this can be done."
Roberts says the system at UCSB — which spent $1.2 million for more than 50 wireless-networked pay stations, some of them solar-powered — has allowed the university to realize a 26 percent rise in parking revenue.
The school no longer has to spend more than $300,000 a year staffing three parking kiosks that have since been eliminated.
There was another benefit: "By taking kiosks away, it made it so there weren't long lines paying for parking anymore," says Mike Rodger of Digital Payment Technologies.
That's just what students and faculty have been doing at the University of California-Santa Barbara, in the year and a half since the campus, with help from IBM, overhauled its parking system.
Students at the University of California-Santa Barbara no longer have to feed coins into the box at the parking lot. The school has installed wireless-networked pay stations, some of them solar-powered.
