It is an oft-expressed frustration in our dense, increasingly bike-friendly city: car parking, in all its myriad mutations.
Even beyond simply finding a space or dealing with pesky street sweeping times, metered spots throughout our Downtown and business districts often land us tickets because we simply forgot to add more money. A meeting that runs late or, even worse, a miscalculation of time left on the thing can lead to the discovering of a parking maid nestled up right next to your vehicle—one minute after expiration.
A company called Parkmobile, however, is trying—now on a micro-level in Long Beach and hopefully on a city-wide one as time progresses—to change all of the frustrations of metered parking spaces. Following a boom of business over the past five years in Europe, Parkmobile has decided to take on select cities in the U.S. market with its app that allows users to pay for their meter via their smartphone. Currently, Long Beach’s Parkmobile testing ground is at the meters surrounding City Hall.
The concept is one that Laurens Eckelboom, Executive Vice-President Marketing & Channels of Parkmobile, admits is common-sense but also told the Post that the company’s “unhealthy obsession” with parking is one which will be appreciated by all.
“Besides Long Beach, we are also available in other locations,” explained Eckelboom. “We are part currently part ExpressPark in the City of Los Angeles with about 7,000 spaces and we plan to expand to 40,000 spaces soon. And we are talking to the parking department in Long Beach to make the same type of expansion happen.”
And here in the States, the appreciation of parking-done-easy goes beyond having an app to control your parking meter. Parkmobile officially paired with PayPal on November 7 so that people don’t even have to worry about how to pay with anything but their PayPal account.
“PayPal has a very big focus on innovation and companies that are truly changing the way people live their lives,” said Randall Davies, Head of Corporate Business Development, Americas at PayPal. “In an industry [such as parking] that hasn’t changed in tens of years, we were thrilled to make the experience [through Parkmobile] as simple as possible for our users.”
Parkmobile is currently available for free in iTunes, Google Play, Windows or Blackberry markets.