Eric Meyer, 24, lives in the Baltimore neighborhood of Canton and knows firsthand about the frustrations of parking in a busy city. A former employee at Phillips Seafood, Meyer found himself driving in circles every time he headed home from work.
“Anyone who has lived in Canton or Federal Hill or a lot of these densely populated neighborhoods knows that searching for spots can be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Meyer said.
So Meyer quit his job and founded the app Haystack, which allows a user who has a parking spot in the Baltimore area to offer it up for a price, usually around $3. A driver who needs a space pays and then takes the spot to complete the exchange.
Cities across the U.S. are turning to similar innovative parking technologies. Just this month, Boston’s Transportation Department announced plans to develop an app, expected to launch in the fall, letting residents pay for parking straight from their smartphones. The city of Evanston, Illinois, recently initiated a similar pilot program.
Miami Beach partnered with ParkMobile and ParkMe in May to launch apps that help drivers find and pay for parking spots. And Chicago will be expanding its pay-by-phone parking service, ParkChicago, to all its 36,000 parking meters by the end of the summer after piloting the app since April.
“What we’re seeing is a demand from our consumers to offer a level of convenience that really heretofore hadn’t been the hallmark of the parking industry,” said Casey Jones, spokesman for the International Parking Institute, the largest trade association for parking professionals and the parking industry.
–
“When you’re driving around, you don’t want to be late, and you don’t want to have to pull out different apps when you won’t know which one does what.”
That’s why companies like Parkopedia and ParkMobile have partnered with automakers like Ford and Volvo to allow drivers to access parking services, some of which are voice-activated, from inside their vehicles.
Six more similar partnerships are in the works for ParkMobile, according to Eckelboom.
Eckelboom isn’t completely sure what is yet to come in terms of parking technology, but he has pondered one possibility:
“Connected vehicles are a valuable extension,” Eckelboom said, “but in the end you could also think about wearables (such as Google Glass). Maybe that will be another … (way) to let you start a parking session.”
