A service that allows drivers to pay for parking from their smartphones hopes to expand the service to private garages, city streets and even valet services.
San Francisco-based QuickPay partners with parking providers to allow mobile payment and access to private garages and public, metered spaces. In many cases, garage and lot owners and municipalities must only put up QR codes to start receiving payments from people with the QP QuickPay app on their iPhone or Android device.
Users must download the app and enter payment and vehicle information, then scan QR codes to pay for parking or gain access to private lots without parking attendants. For each transaction QuickPay takes a percentage from the user and the facility. The setup is active mostly in California but expanding across the country. The first East Coast location is Boston's Pi Alley garage, shown above.
"They can pay with credit cards at facilities that normally take only cash, bypass the cashiers, skip taking tickets or worrying about lost tickets, and get e-mail receipts," said QuickPay chief executive Barney Pell. "For some facilities, they can enter by special lanes, or even get access to locations that are normally available only to monthly parkers."
Pell said the system will open up access those small, unattended lots and garages that usually cater to monthly parkers. First, the facilities must let QuickPay know rates and what hours they're open and set up payment information.
"Then to work with their existing systems, we have a proprietary and inexpensive gate-arm kit that we install at each parking entrance and exit gate, which lets our cloud-based system raise the gate whenever a user scans the gate's QR code with their mobile device," Pell said.
On public roads, cities and towns can simply post a QR code on a parking meter. Once the user scans the code with a smartphone, his or her license plate info is sent to enforcement so no tickets are issued. While that may require some minor technology upgrades at a systemwide level, it doesn't require any improvement to meters. Valet parking attendants can use QuickPay-generated confirmation codes to collect payment and keep track of who owns what car.
From the user standpoint, parkers can also use the QP QuickPay app to find open parking spots, look up rates and get directions to garages. Eventually, Pell envisions the app supporting dynamic pricing, where parking rates change depending on demand. Additionally, QuickPay will let parking facilities hold spaces and offer discounts. "Over time, [QuickPay] will support loyalty programs, coupons, advance reservations and much more."
This morning, QuickPay executives announced that they had received an unspecified amount of funding from Fontinalis Partners, a Michigan investment firm whose founding partners include Ford executive chairman William Clay Ford Jr. QuickPay boss Pell is himself a well-known name in the tech community, having founded numerous companies including Powerset, a search technology company acquired by Microsoft, and Moon Express, a lunar exploration and mining company.
