Whoosh, here it is: Parking app arrives
Using city meters no longer requires coins — or even being near your vehicle
KINGSTON, N.Y. » A smartphone app now can be used to pay for metered parking in the city. Megan Weiss-Rowe, Kingston’s director of communication and community engagement, said the Whoosh! app “can be used anywhere right now, even meters that haven’t been manually updated.”
She noted, though, that the app currently be used only to purchase an hour of parking for the new rate of $1. Fractions of hours will be available for purchase through the Whoosh! app by the end of the months, Weiss Rowe said.
The city has been updating its meters all week to accept Whoosh! payments and to reflect the newly doubled on-street parking rates.
“We’ve updated the meters from Downtown up through about Deising’s [bakery on Broadway] in Midtown,” Weiss-Rowe
said in an email Friday. “They are updating them on a daily basis, and all of the meters will be updated by the end of the month, if not sooner.”
Of the Whoosh! app, Mayor Steve Noble said last week that the city’s goal “is to provide an alternative option to payment by coins. We want to make accessing our business districts easier and more convenient, and ultimately we expect to see a reduction in the number of tickets issued due to overdue meters.”
Whoosh! users — who supply their license plate number and credit card information, then use a map in the app to note the approximate location of their vehicle — will be notified through the app when their meter time is near expiration. The users then can remotely extend their time for a 35-cent fee.
Parking enforcement officers will determine if a vehicle has time left on its meter by checking the record for the license plate number.
The Whoosh! app is available for iOS and Android phones and is free to download. The 35-cent “convenience fee” charged for each transaction goes to the app company, not the city.
All meters in Kingston still will accept coin payments, as well.
Weiss-Rowe said there will be a four-hour limit for parking in all onstreet metered spaces, which is reflected on the Whoosh! app.
But “an additional benefit of paying by phone,” she said, “is that users will be able to carry their time to other parking spaces throughout the city, encouraging individuals to move seamlessly between our business districts.”
The plan to increase the cost of on-street metered parking was included in development of the city’s 2017 budget. The budget counted on the city buying payment kiosks to begin charging for the use of municipal parking lots, which currently are free. The city’s budget anticipated $175,000 in revenue from increased parking fees, but that was based on the kiosks being purchased and installed by April 1 and onstreet meter rates being increased at the same time.
After public opposition to the kiosks was raised, Noble opted to delay their purchases and establish a task force to review parking citywide. In April, Noble said the city expected to have its new parking kiosks delivered “around July.” He said the kiosks were to be installed in six of the city’s municipal lots: three in the Uptown business district; on Cornell and Prince streets in Midtown; and on Dock Street in the Rondout area. Noble also said the city would offer a $10 parking permit to frequent users of the municipal lots, which would be valid until the end of the year.