Parking-app convenience fees in 312 U.S. cities (median $0.35 per session) | Hacker News Reader

Parking-app convenience fees in 312 U.S. cities (median $0.35 per session)

parkgraph.com

63 pointsparkgraph43 comments

It shouldn't be called a "convenience fee" unless you can opt out of it and pay some other non-convenient way. What if I don't want their version of convenience? Why should I have to pay a convenience fee? Why can't they just roll this into the main price of parking? It's gotten to the point where as soon as I see the word "fee" I assume I'm being ripped off.

Why can't they just roll this into the main price of parking?

Be careful what you ask for. A common ploy for dominating marketplaces (Amazon, Doordash, etc) is to prohibit merchants from offering lower direct prices than what's offered on their platforms. They always say this is to guarantee that you'll get the best prices with them. But that's a twisted way of saying all prices must be at least as high as theirs, and the point, of course, is to remove any incentive for merchants not to use the middleman.

Then wouldn't it make more sense to roll this into the main price so the main price seems higher rather than lower?

At least in my town you can opt out by paying with coins. So the convenience fee is for not having to carry coins around. For me at least it's worth the trade.

They should just call it what it is, a booking fee.

Nothing inherently wrong with a booking fee if it is transparent.

How is that any different? It's still a fee you can't opt out of by using a different method

Reminds me of the early years of ATMs, when banks would charge their customers a fee for the privilege of using a machine instead of a human teller.

I have been out of this industry annd without stake in it for years. But I co-founded PayByPhone, the original pay-for-parking app. TFA suggests that it’s charging $0 in fees. Is this true?

Then aside from theories of corrupt decision making, why wouldn’t every city or parking provider choose the $0 option? (Particularly city governments with a responsibility to their residents.)

The option that's fee-free to users probably costs more for the city, whereas the ones that charge a fee will probably be cheaper or even free for the city.

A city council member trying to balance a budget isn't engaging in corruption by choosing the option that reduces an expense in the city budget, even if it just places the cost on the people paying for parking instead. Constituents would be more likely to complain about higher property taxes or cuts to city services than to complain about a fee like this.

Maybe they just got bribed, but that seems less likely.

PayByPhone also shows ads in the parking experience (thankfully, not too obtrusively, and not until the parking is confirmed). So, they could be covering some of the cost that way.

> A city council member trying to balance a budget isn't engaging in corruption by choosing the option that reduces an expense in the city budget, even if it just places the cost on the people

Sounds like a pretty solid definition of corruption to me. Siphon private individuals' money into a corporation instead of using public money to offer public services.

Up here in BC PayByPhone used to charge the same rates as meters. Now, most cities have taken out the meter and PayByPhone charges a per transaction fee.

Dinner running long and you need 10 more minutes? That’s .25 for parking and .35 for the app.

I think Vancouver used to batch at the end of the day (I would only see one transaction for all sessions in a day) eat the transaction fee, and paid a flat yearly rate to PayByPhone for managing it. The new contract - signed after meters disappeared- added the fees.

It pisses me off to no end that if I try to do the right thing and pay for a quick few minutes to run in somewhere I get whacked with a transaction fee that costs more than parking.

For some stuff e.g. third party managed golf booking websites, they charge the golf course "no fees" per booking, but they get 100% of the revenue from 1 or 2 bookings per day, whatever the exact terms.

> responsibility to their residents

I've lived in a lot of places.

In most places electeds usually have some conception of a sort of broadly construed responsibility is to residents.

But in larger cities it's a responsibility to voters and voting blocs, not residents per se. And this is particularly true in older east coast cities.

Living in Washington and yes, there are zero fees in the cities listed (and others). Great app, thank you for making it, it makes life a lot easier for me and the city!

It’s getting out of control. Not that long ago 25 cents paid for the parking entirely.

This is an area where I’m hoping AI will cause total disruption. There’s no reason for all these apps to exist. A high school kid with AI coding could build a perfectly functional app in an afternoon and keep more money in local communities. These parking app companies need to just go away.

I don’t think the price is the problem. Parking is too cheap in most places. [1] Under-pricing parking has serious negative consequences that most of us just don’t think about.

The problem here is that cities outsource everything to predatory contractors or even sell off parking management entirely (e.g. Chicago).

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-06-30/paying-for-par...

It is so damn annoying. Why is anyone asking for this? I can already tap to pay with card or mobile wallet at traditional meters that take coins still. But with these 'pay by app' bullshit operations they expect you to sit there and download a 600mb shitware app on your terrible mobile data connection when you are trying to make a dinner reservation.

You have to figure city council who approved this are either idiots or getting bribes.

There is an app commonly used in Italy that can be convenient. No need to find a pay machine or whether it's even working. You have your rego already entered so just confirm location and choose duration. If you return earlier, you can check in and refund the unused portion so there's no real fretting about duration either.

Having a consistent app throughout a solid amount of the country means you don't need to learn a new payment system interface in every new town, find out whether you can change language, is it tap or insert to pay, are there skimmers, etc.

i recently encountered a town where the only option to pay was via some app that forced me to hand over my phone number and email address

This happened to me, right after I was finished I asked them to delete my data, they said they did, years later they mailed me to tell me my data was leaked.

Where I live in the Bay Area it seems like every city has been using the same ParkMobile app for a good decade, so it was set up once and use everywhere. Not sure if that was coordinated but it’s nice.

I can already tap to pay with card or mobile wallet at traditional meters that take coins still. But with these 'pay by app' bullshit operations they expect you to sit there and download a 600mb shitware app on your terrible mobile data connection when you are trying to make a dinner reservation.

Or, like I've had to deal with twice this month — the parking space is underground, so the app doesn't work until you get to the surface.

Also annoying: I had to stop using the iPhone Lockdown mode because the parking apps I have to use break when it's enabled.

The city of Portland, OR's Parking Kitty app works pretty well. It's 67MB and lets me extend parking as needed without having to go back to the car. Transaction fees are minimal too, I think $0.20.

I prefer it to meters.

I have a stash of quarters in my car for parking and they are becoming useless. I have what is essentially an AOSP phone with no Google/Apple/app store - so I guess there's just some places I can't park? It's a pre-paid plan so I can't text the shortcode to pay, and I don't pay for data so even if the web is an option it won't work unless there's free wifi in the area. Whatever happened to accepting legal tender? At least if the meter accepts a tap-to-pay card I can only be beholden to a credit card company and not additionally a cell carrier and one of the app duopoly. (Yes, I'm <1%; what's your inclusive answer?)

More and more, governments are failing to provide a satisfying answer to "What if the person doesn't have a smartphone?" You should not need to buy a mandatory device in order to exist in society.

Even having one is of course no guarantee that yours will be functional at the present moment.

the reason they get away with this is because of city government corruption and not any technical barrier

Here on the east coast I have parknyc, parkwhiz, pango, passport, best parking, and God knows what else. All these towns use different apps and they're all less than 5 miles away from each other. Most have sealed up the coin slot or taken the meter away, forcing you to use the app.

Interesting that the blog post's app charges + 10% per transaction (min $0.75). So their floor is about 2x the median.

I often end up using the app and paying the fee because I can stop my parking when I leave and be reimbursed unused time. Where I may have paid for 3 hours previously and lost $1.50 when I got back an hour early, the 45 cent fee lets me get that $1.50 back.

That is not a feature that exists in any system I've used. Sounds nice though.

I've seen a city that uses Passport Parking refund the unused time. They also use PayByPhone with the same location code, and using that method did not refund the unused time.

The banality of evil

Yeah, if I remember correctly the initial business model of paybyphone was precisely that they were pocketing the overlap between parking sessions and using that to deploy at no cost for the city and invisible cost for the drivers

An extremely easy popular piece of legislation would be to ban these sort of junk fees.

Here in Chicago it's extremely annoying because you can pay physically at the meter with a credit card and not get hit with these junk fees, but if you use their app, you have to pay the fee, and extending the time hits you with the fee again. The app is a piece of garbage that hasn't been meaningfully updated in years and it's not like maintaining the physical meter is free either. Plus when you use the app they require you to load a minimum $20 balance into it so all the Abu Dhabi princes who own our public infrastructure get to make interest on that hostage money. When I street park I make it a point to pay at the meter with my most expensive Amex.

there must be a law to cap these fees at 4-5% of the service. This is roughly 2x of the cost to process credit card payment

Might cost them more paying in change to be honest. Someone's earning a good city pension from taking those quarters out of the machine.

Most “public” parking is private, of course, but predictably most of these comments on HN grousing about the public sector.

I would not be surprised if this per-session is to cover credit card processing fees.

But what would be nice is being able to preload a balance and get hit with the fee only once.

Every place I’ve been, the fee isn’t charged if you use the pay station with your credit card. It is only charged if you use the app.

I miss the old CashKeys[1]. Some cities had a digital 'key' (basically an EEPROM in a funky key-like TRRS form factor) that you could buy and preload $10-20 at a time on. When you clicked them all the way into the meter, it acted like you inserted one quarter. You'd pull it out a click and click it back in, and it'd drop another 'quarter' in. Repeat as much as you needed, and you could mix the CashKey with actual coins being dropped in the slot.

They lasted to the mid-2010s, when Duncan stopped selling keys and software and eventually, support.

[1] https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0816/08/duncan-...

https://ggwash.org/view/35377/its-a-little-harder-to-pay-for...

I didn’t think I’d run across something even less convenient and slower than using quarters - but here we are.

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