Montreal’s official opposition wants city to modernize parking app
Posted June 2, 2022 3:49 pm.
Ensemble Montréal wants the city to enforce the user-pay principle within the P$ Mobile Service application.
Arem Salem, leader of the official opposition at city hall, and Effie Giannou, city councillor for Bordeaux-Cartierville, held a press conference Thursday morning asking the city to modernize its application so it will credit users when they leave a parking space early.
People are losing money
“The current payment method does not allow users to read the parking time remaining at a station, accumulate time, or signal their departure from a parking space,” said Salem in a press release.
“If a user pays on the assumption that he will be there for three hours and ends up leaving after one hour, he loses money. Worse, the person who takes his place must pay over again even if the time is already paid. It doesn’t make sense to pay for a service you don’t use, or to charge people twice,” he explained.
Ensemble Montréal suggests offering an option within the P$ Mobile Service app to allow users to notify the app when they leave their parking space. Overpayments would then be credited back to users through the application for future use.
The technology exists
A number of Canadian cities, like Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria, offer a “leave” button in their parking application that allows you to stop being charged.
“Technology allows us to accurately charge for usage, so let’s do it,” said Giannou.
Although nearly 80 per cent of on-street parking clients use the P$ Mobile Service application (and this percentage is growing every year), Ensemble Montréal councillors say they are aware of the digital divide that could result from this.
The motion will be presented to city council on June 13 – and it also requests that Montreal explore solutions to ensure that the user-pay principle is available to users of physical pay stations.
