A new plan put forth by the City of Madison may put motor vehicle drivers at ease.
While the feature is not exactly foreign to UW-Madison via a flex parking program created in 2009, the City of Madison plans to reveal a pay-by-phone feature with parking meters that will allow for individuals to add time to their parking meter over the phone with a credit card, incurring a fee of about 45 cents.
The meter, which will be located in the Capitol State Street garage and serve 19 vehicles stalls and 10 motorcycle stalls, is undoubtedly a good idea.
The City of Madison has an initial contract to install 100 multispace meters, the first of which were installed on Sept. 15, 2010 at the Buckeye Lot. The meters allow individuals to pay with most widely accepted credit cards in addition to coins and, so far, 77 of the 100 multispace meters have been installed and are working. The other 23 are either being tested or wired and will be installed later this year.
While the recently unveiled multispace meters work in much the same way as traditional meters, in that a parker simply enters a credit card to pay for his or her parking space, the new pay-by-phone feature will essentially allow an individual to bypass the annoyance of having to leave their location to attend to their parking meter to add more time in trying to avoid getting a ticket.
Some may consider the 45-cent fee as a seedy little way for the city to make money. That may be true, though at the same time, it is truly doing the customer a favor. Compare that to, say, one of the countless fees that some banks have tried to slap upon a customer for not using their credit card every month or even any of the other countless annoying fees that people encounter on a daily or weekly basis.
Yet, in fairness, UW-Madison and other institutions and cities have been on top of this pesky problem for some time.
PayByPhone, formerly known as Verrus, is a service that allows individuals to pay for parking directly though either a phone call or a mobile app downloadable directly from Apple's App Store, the Android Market or Blackberry's App World. Roughly a dozen collegiate schools have implemented the service for parking on their campuses, and a host of major metropolitan cities, including Chicago, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans and Seattle, have all integrated the service with their city's traditional and other multispace or technologically savvy meters. The service, which accepts such major credit cards as Visa, MasterCard and American Express, is slowly being rolled out in other countries, too.
It is unclear as to whether the City of Madison will be integrating PayByPhone or some other type of homogenous service, though it appears that PayByPhone has a virtual monopoly in the parking-paying world at this point. PayByPhone's service fees typically run anywhere between 25 to 35 cents depending on both the Vendor and whether an individual used the service's other features, including text message reminders and digital receipts.
Nonetheless, the idea of paying for parking by use of a mobile phone is certainly a good one and is a major convenience for parkers everywhere, regardless of a few extra cents that one will have to pay.
Ethan Safran is a freshman with an undeclared major. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
