Txt2park uses PayPal Mobile to pay for UK car parking charges
Link: Txt2park - This is South Devon.
A former Nokia executive Kevin Lindon-Emms has offered a revolutionary new parking payment system to Torbay’s new mayor Nick Bye that could help end the misery of £1.7million handed out in parking fines.
But so far Kevin, 40, has not been given the opportunity to outline his Txt2Park system that allows you to pay your car parking charges by text on your mobile phone - securely through PayPal, made famous by the renowned eBay auction site.
Adoption of the system for a £5,000 one off fee and ten per cent of the transaction charge for parking in car parks is the offer which entrepreneur Kevin hopes will be taken up first by Torbay Council.
Well I like this a lot. I like the fact Kevin’s sorted it all out and used PayPal Mobile as the mechanism. Simple, effective, quick to go live.
Unfortunately Kevin is being exposed to the good old British way of getting things done. He’s quoted saying …
There is apathy in the council about implementing anything new.
It’s a shame we don’t generally have go-get-it forward thinking councils willing to support entrepreneurs here in the UK.
I wonder how much of the apathy is related to the private companies making millions for themselves and the councils out of parking charges and fines. Too much of a good thing I’m sure.
I was 30 seconds late to re-fill the parking meter when I was in Brighton a while ago and got a £40 fine. The chap was nowhere to be seen when I thundered down the street to stick in the pound coins. Txt2park would fix this for me you see. The councils would lose all that ‘legal but totally 100% not fair’ revenue.
I wish Kevin and his team every success. I’ve tried hunting for more details on Txt2park but to no avail as yet.
As a founder of a company with a similar concept in Oslo, Norway. The city governement of Oslo is very positive to such a solution and it is implemented on all public on-street parking. Each parking area has a unique number (parking zone) with is’t own billing regime. That is, in the central areas the price is higher, than out of town. The parking is started by sending a text message with only the number for the zone to the companies short number. Default parking time is 3 hours. 15 minutes before ended parking time a “15 minutes left notification” is sent out. One can then terminate the parking or renew the parking by sending in another text message. Very nice for people sitting in business meetings. The system has a complete web solution such each customer can review his/hers parking history etc. The system is integrated towards VISA and Mastercard billing platform. Every parking operator has a bar code scanner such they are scanning the sticker each user has in the wind shield telling that he/she is using the mPay parking system.
For more information please contact Gaute Langaas at glangaas@mpay.no
Posted by Gaute Langaas on June 23rd, 2006 at 8:22 am.