There’s an app for that: potential smartphone paid parking

Paying for parking in Regina could become a bit easier in the future.

The city’s manager of parking services, Faisal Kalim, will be recommending to the community and protective services committee a pay-by-phone parking option.

“It’s basically an application that would allow a person to put in their licence plate and some credit card information and pay for parking without actually putting coin in the meter,” he said.

“That information would be uploaded to the enforcement handhelds, so when an enforcement officer comes by they could see the persons paid for parking and carry on.”

Kalim said they just updated the handhelds last year and the upgrade to pay-by-phone parking wouldn’t cost a whole lot more.

“The attractive thing about a pay-by-phone system is it’s largely just software capital costs, so there’s no infrastructure that actually needs to change in the field.”

The software is essentially free in some cases, Kalim pointed out. He said through a study they found some companies would offer the service for no money to the city but in return charge the user a nominal convenience fee.

“The city has the option to absorb that convenience fee or to pass that on to the customers. The convenience fee could fee could be upwards of $100,000 — so because of the large cost — we’re sending it through the 2019 budget process.”

Kalim added the two-hour parking limit would remain along with the coin meters.