Matt Glaeser had just placed his children in their grandparents’ house for the day he stopped in a parking space near Sam’s Bagels on Boulevard Larchmont on the way to work. He tried to feed the counter from a roll of neighborhoods which he keeps in his car, but the slit of the parts was blocked. He reached his credit card but then noticed that the screen said “Pay by App” and showed a QR code.
He tried to scan the QR code with his phone, but the screen was so striped with graffiti that it did not work. He therefore sent an SMS to the number on the “Pay to Kare” sticker under the part slot. After waiting for a minute and wondering if the text had passed, he received a text with a link to a website. He opened the site on his phone and hit his credit card number and address. But before completing the payment, the site alerted it that it should pay additional processing costs just to park for 15 minutes.
“It was only 35 cents, but I said to myself:” Forget this, I will find an outdated bagel at the office “,” said Glaeer.
Find parking in the Los An region struggleBut these days, paying for parking can be just as obnoxious. Depending on whether you are parking in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills or Pasadena, a counter could ask you to pay with neighborhoods, a credit card, an application or a combination of the three. In public land, you may need to memorize an area, space number or a license plate and often I do not know which until you arrive at the payroll station. You just have to have a law -respecting citizen abandon, cross your fingers and hope that a parking lot manager does not pass.
As the 25 -year -old comedy writer said, Emma Parsons de Palms, “parking is already one of the things I hate the most. I don’t want to spend more time.”
People studying parking recognize that the proliferation of parking applications and other payment methods has made the modern experience to pay for unusually complicated and frustrating parking. The two parking applications that the city uses – Smarter park And Parkmobile – Offer useful innovations such as alert the drivers when a parking session is about to expire and allowing them to add more time at a distance, but when each city in the Socal zone has contracted a different application that must be downloaded in the street in order to avoid a ticket, these advantages no longer seem to be worth it.
With various parking applications used in different areas of southern California, drivers find that the experience of paying for parking has become unusually complicated.
(Kim Chapin / Los Angeles Times)
Parking applications have existed for more than a decade, but researchers say that southern California is still in the early stages of their evolution with a multitude of providers in the running to become the default payment method for the region. Like the universal adoption of the USB-C cable has rationalized the possibility of loading a variety of home devices, whether manufactured by Apple, Samsung or another company, experts say that one parking application that allows drivers to pay for parking at meters and tracks on the other side of the region would considerably reduce frustration and increase compliance. They do not recommend that a company have a monopoly on southern California parkters or for a law that restricts competition, but they say that a more uniform system is possible. For example, the European Easypark application operates in 20 countries and more than 3,200 cities.
“We are a bit behind the curve,” said Mike Manville, UCLA urban planning teacher and author of the recent article “The causes and consequences of managing the sidewalk parking. “” The applications are not new, but they are not entirely sorted to a point where we can see if we will get a standardization. ”
Tony Jordan from Parking reform networkA non -profit organization that educates the public on the impact of the parking policy on climate change, equity, housing and traffic, said that it hoped that a more rationalized system would soon come.
“I think we get closer,” he said. “Technology arrives there both on application and payment. If we pass over the next two years, this problem could improve. ”
“Parking is already one of the things I hate the most. I don’t want to spend more time there. ”
– Emma Parsons, 25
Los Angeles, which houses the first highway and the country’s training church, has long been ambivalent if not downright antagonistic towards paid parking. The city installed its first parkters in North Hollywood in the summer of 1949 (five hundred per hour), but only after the municipal council rejected three previous attempts to put meters in the street in 1940, 1942 and 1946. The editorials of this newspaper at the time did pricing against parks to parking, with a declarant “just as just to install rounds for sidewalk pedestrians. “”
The city kept the prices of the counters set for 17 years old From 1992 to 2008, it increased the prices as high as $ 4 an hour for parking with measurements in the most congestioned areas. The first meters that accepted credit cards were installed in 2010, years after most people have stopped modifying changes. As late Donald ShoupProfessor at the UCLA and beloved Guru of parking studies before, the Parcmeter park was one of the rare inventions that barely changed since its creation in 1928.
Today, the Los Angeles Ministry of Transport operates 35,261 measured spaces, including 32,944 spaces metered on the street and 2,317 Mesqués out of street, said the spokesperson for Ladot Colin Sweeney. It also manages 11,347 out of street parking spaces in lots and garages. Collectively, these remuneration counters and stations collected around 40 million dollars in the last financial year.
The applications to be paid for parking were introduced for the first time in Los Angeles in 2014, and the general adoption of contactless options was accelerated due to the pandemic. Despite the frustrations of certain drivers, the city now looks further on mobile payments for parking. Payment text options will be available on all counters at the end of 2025 and payment of the application and Tap-to-Pay will be installed on all the Los Angeles parkters by the end of 2026. At the same time, the meters of the Los Angeles region will continue to accept parts and cards, Sweeney has declared-as long as the slot machines are not also blurred and that the cards player works. (Glaeser should have been able to pay by card to the Boulevard Larchmont counter unless the reader was broken, said Sweeney.)
The agency also plans to install new and improved parking equipment in LADOT car parks and to improve the signaling of the orientation of these installations. According to the Ladot website, it is currently not planned to add the Apple remuneration to meters.
Parking applications to download, depending on where you go to the region of
Parking applications will probably become more intuitive over time as suppliers are trying and users get used to them, but for the moment, Angelenos must navigate the city’s parking payment problems as best they can.
Parsons, the 25 -year -old actress, decided to keep a bottle of pills filled with neighborhoods in her handbag and car since her move in January, because she found a payment for parking with pieces easier and faster than any other method.
“I have never transported money with me in my life, but I don’t want to download an application every time I go to a new field,” she said. “It is rare that I have a dollar ticket on me, but paying parking with neighborhoods is great. I love it. “
Leah Ferrazzani, who lives in Los Angeles and works in Pasadena, said that she currently had four parking applications on her phone – two for the, one for Pasadena and one for the USC, where she goes for medical meetings.
“The only one that makes life easier for me is the pasadena because it is the most friendly and because I work here, so it is the one I use most often,” she said.
Even the most informed by applications have found current systems frustrating. Jonathan Badeen, a 43-year-old resident of Sherman Oaks and co-founder of the dating website, Tinder, recently spent 10 minutes trying to understand how to pay a counter on Ventura boulevard when his iPhone could not read the QR code on the screen before finally abandoning. In the end, he spent more time trying to pay parking than doing his race.
Badeen is happy that counters have evolved from the era of the districts of which he remembers his beginnings in Los Angeles in the aughts, but he also thinks that parking applications do not facilitate parking for anyone.
“Unless the country or the city or the whole metropolitan region wants to standardize on something or that they slap an apple salary there, I think it is a bad idea,” said the man who invented the shift on the right. “And I know something about applications.”
