Here’s another idea for the world!

For anyone who parks a car/truck/van on a city street or parking lot, at some point, you have had to put money or a credit card into a centralized parking payment machine and then place the issued parking receipt on your vehicle’s dash (face up of course). Pretty standard stuff if you live in a city and drive a vehicle. Usually, you pay for 1 or 2 hours of parking at a time. Then what happens? You have to run back and put more money into the centralized parking payment machine and again you need to put the new parking receipt on the dash of your vehicle. It is a real pain in the butt.

Here’s another idea that I will license under Apache License 2. 🙂

Lets combine the new technology in smartphones with the existing parking infrastructure.

1. Add Near Field Communication (NFC) ability to those centralized parking payment machines.
2. Update the centralized parking payment machines to printout 2 types of parking receipts
• Regular parking receipts with the normal end time
• New parking receipt with a bar code and ticket number
3. For those with a smartphone with NFC, when you go to the centralized parking payment machines, you pay via NFC with your smartphone and the machine issues the new parking receipt with bar code and ticket number
4. You place the parking receipt as usual on your vehicle’s dash
5. When the meter-person inspects your parking receipt, they will need to scan the bar code or input the ticket number to see if the time has expired.
6. Finally, the MOST critical part, the parking company must allow their customers to put more money towards the parking receipt (via an app or web page or whatever).

Now why go through all of this? Because now you will be able to “feed the meter” from anywhere, without having to run back to your vehicle.

Of course, features like having the app on your smartphone popup with an announcement that you only have 5 minutes left before the parking time expires would be excellent.

If parking lot companies make it very easy to pay for parking then more people will pay in a timely fashion, hence, in the end, it will mean MORE revenue for the parking companies.

Regards,
Roger Lacroix
Capitalware Inc.