MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — As of Wednesday, you can officially trade in your spare change for your smart phone.
The Parkmobile Application went live in Morgantown, allowing users to pick one of the 900 parking spots in town and use the application to pay for parking.
“It’s a great service that you’re able to do something that has been kind of a pain in the past where you park and you go to the meter and you have to have the right amount of change or you go to a kiosk and you have to put your credit card in and sometimes wait in line,” Parkmobile Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Perkins said. “We just let you do it all in the app.”
About a year after beginning to work with West Virginia University, Perkins said the City of Morgantown wanted to join the application’s database at the behest of the Parking Authority.
“The Morgantown Parking Authority kind of saw what we’re doing and thought it would be a pretty good experience for people attending the University already using the app to then just start using the app all around town,” he said.
He said the application would help Parking Authority employees streamline how they do their work.
“It actually makes the process of going through and just enforcing parking a lot easier, a lot more efficient.”
Perkins said it’s not just a time-saver, but a cost saver for municipalities and users alike.
“It’s just a smarter way to park,” he said. “People who start using the app generally become very heavy users, so they never have change anymore for the meter. They never go to the parking kiosk anymore. They are always just using the app.”
He said about 30 percent of the app’s users want to use ParkMobile regardless of where they are, making a partnership with Morgantown ideal.
“All you do is you find a spot, you look for what is usually a sticker or sign with a zone number in it, and you just enter that zone number, pick the duration of your parking session, and you press start,” Perkins said. “And there will be kind of a countdown clock that shows you how much time you have left in your session.”
Parkmobile is in a number of major cities, including New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.