Montgomery County to roll out pay-by-cell phone option at parking meters
Bethesda pilot program had 7,000 registered users
Overpaying at a parking meter may become a thing of the past as Montgomery County expands a program that allows users to add, or remove, time from a meter with their cell phone.
After a successful pilot program in downtown Bethesda, the Montgomery County Department of Transportation plans to expand the pay-by-cell phone option to all 12,000 meters in county parking districts, said Stephen Nash, chief of the division of parking management. The districts are in Bethesda, Silver Spring, Wheaton and Montgomery Hills.
Gretchen Koitz, 62, lives and works in Bethesda, and is used to feeding a parking meter. She has been ticketed, and doesn't take any chances now.
"You don't mess around with parking meters in Bethesda," Koitz said.
"It's a great idea. I think the great thing about cell phones is that it notifies you, which the meter doesn't do," Koitz said.
How it works
More than 7,000 unique accounts have been created with no complaints since the pilot period began in January, Nash said. The pilot program included a total of 1,200 parking meters in a lot, garage, and adjacent on-street meters along Bethesda Avenue.
The option to pay with a cell phone allows users to call a number and enter the unique number on a meter's decal to initiate a parking session for an amount of time they choose, Nash said. Accounts can be created over the phone or online and are linked to cell numbers.
One of the biggest perks of paying with a cell phone is that customers only pay for the time they are at the meter, Nash said. By calling into the system again when leaving the parking spot, users can remove their remaining time from the session and not be charged.
The system will also send a text message to alert customers when their time is almost up, and will stop charging them if a fee is no longer required after a certain hour or day of the week, Nash said. The system doesn't allow users to park more than the allotted hours or during restricted times.
When the user pays with their phone, the meter will still show that it is expired, Nash said. Parking enforcement contractors monitor the lots on existing routes and use wireless handheld devices to query the system to see if a session has been paid for.
No more digging for change
The county's vendor MobileNow! charged an additional 25-cent fee per session to use the service during the pilot period, Nash said. Under the new three-year contract, the fee has increased to 35 cents but now covers the installation and cost of decals that were previously paid by the county.
The County Council approved $50,000 for the pilot project in 2009, but the program will operate in the future with no cost to the county, Nash said.
MobileNow! will profit from the 35-cent fee, and the county will continue to receive the normal fee paid by the customer for the parking session, Nash said.
The option of pay-by-cell parking has become standard for any new parking project in the country, said Krista Tassa, president of MoblieNow! of Rockville.
The company has two similar contracts in Georgia and New York, Tassa said.
She expects the program to be successful in Montgomery County because the pilot area saw 50,000 parking sessions since January.
The county's fiscal 2011 operating budget projects the county to receive $21 million in parking fees, $9.8 million in fines from parking tickets, and $9.9 million in taxes generated from business that use the parking spaces, Nash said.
The county did not see an increase or decrease in revenue during the pilot program, Nash said. He expects new customers attracted by the option to balance out the money that may be lost by the people who would have previously overpaid.
"This is pretty much revenue neutral, but it greatly expands the capability of meters to service the public," Nash said.
The goal is to finish the Bethesda parking district before expanding to Silver Spring, Wheaton, and Montgomery Hills, he said. All 12,000 county meters should be finished by the spring.
Loose change
Luke Mastalli, 18 of Bethesda has gotten used to carrying quarters for meters, and thinks having to make a phone call just to park is too much of a hassle.
"I can see using it if for instance you parked and took the Metro downtown," Mastalli said. "Otherwise if I'm just in a store I can run out and use more quarters."
Fred Schellhammer, 53, of Bethesda doesn't plan on paying with his cell phone because he is concerned that digitizing parking, like speed cameras, is just a quicker way to get a ticket. He is concerned that the system would alert a parking enforcement officer immediately when time expires.
"Maybe that's too conspiracy theorist of me," Schellhammer said.
Nash said enforcement officers are not notified when meters expire and the department does not plan to change that because it would be inefficient.
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