City Seeking New Pay-by-Phone Meter Vendor

Julie Happy, 509.625.7773

Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 2:51 p.m.

The City is making a change of service providers for pay by phone services. Effective Friday, February 17, service with Locomobi, by way of the QuickPay app, ended due to vendor non-payment of revenue to the City. The City made numerous attempts to negotiate a payment schedule and extend opportunities for re-payment to Locomobi. After failing to respond and follow through with agreements, the City made the decision to cancel the service.

In an effort to make service interruption as short as possible, a Request for Proposal (RFP) process has begun to find a pay-by-phone service provider that can accommodate additional uses outside of just allowing a customer to pay for parking with their phone. It is hopeful that an interim provider will be available within a few weeks as we go through the RFP process to find a new vendor.

Credit Cards and coin payment continue to be accepted form of payment. Parking Enforcement officers will be lenient and tolerant when individuals are getting change to pay the meter.

The City is seeking a service that is better-suited to tackle some of the big challenges that have emerged in offering pay-by-phone parking to customers, such as:

  • Accommodating payment for both individual space meters (pay by space) and time-restricted zones (pay by plate)
  • Providing customers an application that is both effortless to navigate for processing payment and easy to update vehicle information.
  • Exploring applications that allow merchants to incentivize patronage by making it easy for them to pay customers’ parking.
  • Increasing efficiency of the application to update and track meter timestays and inventory.
  • Expanding integration as part of long-term planning to explore the option of allowing parking payments that cover both parking in the right-of-way and parking off-street.
  • Managing the varying elements of the parking system in a comprehensive manner.

311 stickers have been applied to the meters to give citizens a number to call if they have questions during the interim while the City works to provide an alternate service.

Visit the City of Spokane’s website to learn more about the Parking Services Program.