Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse, with scissors, cuts the ribbon at the unveiling of Pango’s mobile app service in Harrisburg Tuesday morning.
Starting today, drivers looking to park their cars in Harrisburg can use a mobile app to do it, thanks to a contract between the city’s new parking operators and Pango USA, a company that offers some form of the pay-by-phone service in several Pennsylvania municipalities.
The app, which is free to download, will require customers to establish an account and to register a method of payment. Once the account is established, a customer can purchase parking with a few taps of the thumb.
For each transaction, Pango will charge customers an additional 14 cents on top of the regular cost of parking. The service is optional and will not replace the city’s meters, Neil Edwards, president of the company’s U.S. operations, said.
Pango unveiled the new parking service Tuesday morning, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony inside and on the street outside Arooga’s along downtown Harrisburg’s restaurant row.
The choice of a restaurant was deliberate, as the app will include coupon and parking validation features that Pango says should help entice customers, offsetting the increase in hourly rates that many businesses fear are driving people away.
Businesses will be able to purchase bundles of validation codes, Edwards said, which can then be passed on to customers as a reward for making a certain amount of purchases. They can also submit coupons that will be exclusively available to Pango customers, and only redeemable while a car is actually parked, he said.
Though the app is free, customers will also be able to add extra features, such as an automatic alert by text 15 minutes before parking expires, for a monthly fee.
At Tuesday’s ribbon-cutting, Mayor Eric Papenfuse touted Pango as a “new and wonderful app” that would “make it both easy and fun to park” while simultaneously providing a benefit to local businesses.
Papenfuse said that his own business, the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, would be offering validations good for one hour of free parking on purchases of $25 or more.
As of Tuesday’s ceremony, the mayor’s bookstore was one of only two businesses offering validations, though Edwards said there would be “four or five” with similar offers by the end of the day and, he hoped, “30 or 40 by the end of the month.”
As an incentive for drivers to sign up for the service, Pango is also offering five hours of free parking to new customers for each car they register.
An individual account can be attached to multiple users and cars, Dani Shavit, Pango’s executive vice president, said.
Customers without smartphones will also be able to use the service, either by calling a hotline or by sending a text. Details about the various ways to use the service are available at the company’s website, Mypango.com.
Standard Parking, which became the new operator of Harrisburg parking after a long-term lease was signed last year as part of the city’s debt solution, had originally contemplated contracting with a different company, Parkmobile, for a version of the pay-by-phone service.
But Pango was able to offer a lower price and a wider range of features, Edwards said, and was ultimately selected out of a handful of possible providers.
Harrisburg’s 14-cent transaction fee is higher than Pango’s price in at least some other Pennsylvania municipalities. In the city of Butler, for instance, where Pango is available in two garages, Pango charges 10 cents per transient parking transaction and $1 for processing the purchase of a $50 monthly permit.
In Scranton, where Pango is available for on-street parking, drivers are not charged any transaction fee at all, since the city opted to pay Pango 5 percent of all receipts, forgoing the option of a 10-cent fee charged to drivers altogether.
“We didn’t want to ‘penalize’ parkers for the use of the system,” David Bulzoni, Scranton’s business administrator, said in an email.
Edwards said the company hoped to have between one-fifth and one-quarter of all parking customers in Harrisburg purchasing parking through Pango in the first year. In Scranton, where the service became available in May 2013, the app was used in about 16 percent of transactions, he said.
Pango USA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Pango Mobile Parking, Ltd., a venture-backed company headquartered in Israel.
The company website claims the service is available in “over 59 cities,” with “more than 1 million active accounts.” Its operations have recently expanded into Brazil.
According to a 2013 company press release, the Pango system is based on patents registered in several countries, among them a U.S. patent awarded in 1999.
A drawing accompanying that patent application details a rudimentary network connecting a customer—by way of mobile phone, payphone or computer terminal—to a central database that subsequently relays information to law enforcement.
The drawing, which predated mobile apps by a decade, is far from imagining a world where a driver could purchase parking by tapping an icon with her thumb. And it doesn’t make any mention of coupons like the Midtown Scholar Bookstore discount which, as of Tuesday, was one of only two coupons available to Harrisburg parkers.
“The mayor is a small-business owner,” Edwards said of Papenfuse, who owns the Midtown Scholar, in a phone interview prior to Tuesday’s ribbon-cutting. “I really connected with him on this level. The ability to have coupons or give free parking—that’s a real benefit. It turns parking into an asset instead of just a necessary evil.”
Pango will be hosting an additional information session about its app at Arooga’s tomorrow, Wednesday, Dec. 10, from 5 to 7 p.m.
