More than 1 million have downloaded mobile pay-parking app, PPA says

Sure, people like to hate on the Philadelphia Parking Authority for “courtesy” tows, tickets, and even, sometimes, its costly real estate deals.

But give the agency credit for its success in streamlining how people pay for metered street parking.

Late last month, the authority’s pay-by-phone app MeterUp was downloaded for the one millionth time since December 2017. Almost 70% of meter payments in the city are now made on mobile devices, PPA officials say.

“It’s a benefit to the public that gives them flexibility and convenience,” said Corinne O’Connor, the director of on-street at the Philadelphia Parking Authority. “No feeding coins into a meter and you don’t have to run back to a kiosk to add extra time.”

With a laugh, O’Connor said, “You can point out how much kinder and gentler the parking authority is.” Customer complaints have dropped.

Before too long, the traditional mechanical parking meter might be found only in museums and on eBay.

The switch to virtual parking has accelerated across the country in the last five years or so. Parkmobile, the authority’s MeterUp contractor, runs pay-by-app programs for about 3,000 cities, said Brendon Crowther, project manager in the on-street division of PPA.

When parking kiosks began arriving in 2005, there were 15,000 coin-operated meters on the streets of Philadelphia, O’Connor said.

All of those single-head meters were cluttering things up, not to mention the cost of maintaining them and collecting tons of coins, she said. “We wanted to kind of reduce the furniture,” O’Connor said.

Today’s traditional meter census: about 450.

Virtual payment has eclipsed kiosks that accept credit cards as the state of the art.

“It’s so much cheaper for the cities, because they have no hardware to pay for,” Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and a parking expert, told The Inquirer in 2018. “In some cities, the only way you can pay for parking is with an app. There’s no parking meters; there’s no hardware.”

PPA has stopped accepting cash at its curbside kiosks — they still take credit cards — and that was “a driving factor that pushed people to want to switch to MeterUp,” O’Connor said.

About 27% of on-street parking customers pay in person at kiosks with credit cards, the agency said, and mechanical meters generate 3% of fees.

MeterUp users can cancel unused time or renew a parking spot before the maximum time they paid for expires, though the rate doubles and then triples, designed as an incentive for turnover. (Spaces can’t be renewed a third time.)

Parkmobile LLC, which is based in Atlanta, charges users 40 cents per transaction.

Tickets for parking over the time limit are $36 in Center City, $26 elsewhere.

The first coin-gobbling parking meter, known as Park-O-Meter No. 1, appeared in downtown Oklahoma City in 1935, invented by a lawyer and newspaper editor as a way to keep traffic moving and shops full.

By 1937, they were on the streets of Atlantic City and Wilmington. Philadelphia took a cautious approach, and the first meters didn’t appear in the city until the late 1940s.

This time, though, the city was an early parking-tech adopter.