When in Rome…
Thanks to Parkopedia’s involvement, Pay to Park can assess different parking conditions in different cities. “When do you pay, how much and what does the payment cover? While one city may designate areas where only residents can park, that may not apply in a different city, where there may be restrictions on entering the city centre for certain types of cars,” Dražil says, listing some of the local variations.
The service is already available in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Norway, with another eight countries soon to follow.
There are also different ways to let people know that you’re using Pay to Park. “If you’re in Berlin, for example, you have to put a piece of paper behind your car window saying you’re using a digital parking service. Customers in Germany are used to this, but many foreigners would have no idea about it. That’s why we have in-app notifications to inform users about these kinds of differences. We also have to take into account the different rules for electric cars.”
Pay to Park definitely isn’t the last chapter in smart parking services. Tomáš Dražil has bold plans. “We are working on predictive parking. We would like to use the existing IT infrastructure to enable a car to advise its driver on the likelihood of finding a parking space in a given location at a given time. The times are changing. And we’re determined to change with them.”
