3 Ways Boston Plans to Fix Parking in the Wake of Haystack’s Demise

When it comes to parking in Boston, the Haystack app left a bad impression on city officials earlier this year. And it's no surprise, given that it allows users to auction out parking spaces to one another for a fee — even if they don’t legally own the spaces they’re brokering. City officials voted in August 2014 to ban companies from trying to make money by selling or leasing public areas without city permission. 

The decision effectively destroyed the app’s potential to help Bostonians find and pay for parking spaces in an area where traffic is a rising concern. The United Nations predicts that seven out of 10 people will be living in an urban center by 2050, a strong indicator that traffic levels in many metropolitan areas will likely increase. In a March 2014 press release, the company INRIX claimed that Boston experienced a 3 percent increase in population growth in 2013, which resulted in a rise in traffic congestion.

But Haystack’s failure in Boston hasn’t prevented the city and local start-ups from taking other steps to make finding and paying for city parking spaces a lot easier for its drivers. These three projects indicate movement to alleviate the situation:

1. The Streetparkd app for Android and iPhone provides parking space data to help demystify local parking rules. Street cleaning schedules, meter limits and no-parking zones, for example, can be difficult to understand or remember from neighborhood to neighborhood. Streetparkd tells users where it’s safe to park, reminds them when to move cars, and lets them know when parking rules change. The app website is currently soliciting Bostonians to participate in a pilot rollout.
2. The city has partnered with TicketZen to allow drivers to pay parking tickets online. A person downloads the app on Android or iPhone, and then scans a ticket barcode or enters the violation number into the app to pay automatically from an online account. Boston is one of more than 100 cities around the world to be part of the app’s launch. All Boston parking tickets began including directions on how citizens can use the app to pay for violations as of Sept. 23, 2014, according to the Boston Herald. The app had already been available for use on its own, but the city’s official partnership came about this fall.
3. The city’s Transportation Department announced plans in June 2014 for a multi-platform smartphone app that would allow people to pay for metered spaces. Boston planned to deploy such a program this fall in partnership with the Office of New Urban Mechanics. Users will download the app, register their license plate number and credit card details, and then enter the name of the street they’re parking on to pay. 

Boston leaders are committed to using technology to take some of the stress out of parking, but developers will have to make sure their solutions don’t involve giving unauthorized users the ability to sell access to public property. Kate Norton, a spokeswoman for Mayor Marty Walsh, told Boston.com that services like Haystack are unwelcome in their city.

“We encourage innovation, particularly relative to addressing our transportation challenges,” she told the Boston Globe. “Services like Haystack, however, artificially inflate the cost of parking and allow individuals to profit from public space. Neither of these activities are in-line with the city’s effort to keep parking as open and publicly accessible as possible.”