Image via Creative Commons/ Lisa @ Sierra Tierra (CC BY 2.0)
On Monday, November 24, Somerville residents will be the first in Greater Boston to be able to feed their parking meters using just a mobile device. Made possible through a partnership with Parkmobile, the idea is to foster collaborative partnerships between the city and businesses and, of course, to inject convenience into the lives of those who find themselves a quarter short of the time they need to park their cars. It’s peculiar, then, that Somerville doesn’t want to afford the same kind of advantage for paying parking tickets.
In late September, the City of Boston announced a partnership with local startup TicketZen so that people who incur parking tickets can pay the fine by simply scanning the barcode through the app. Spun out of Terrible Labs and in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the Boston Transportation Department, TicketZen was something of a no-brainer.
We prioritize the cities that we support based on public interest
The service streamlines what would typically be a clunky municipal process, wherein a user has to enter the likes of the ticket number, license plate and credit card information. Now a straightforward scan suffices.
Mayor Marty Walsh has made it clear that simplifying city procedures is crucial for the growth of innovation, even penning an op/ed on BostInno in which he used the procurement of dog licenses as a euphemism for such.
So why wouldn’t Somerville want to follow suit?
According to City of Somerville spokesperson Daniel DeMaina, they consider TicketZen to be a redundancy.
“Given that the City’s parking website is optimized for mobile – so someone who receives a ticket can pay from their mobile device without an additional app – and that TicketZen overlays on the existing ticketing system, City officials felt that it wasn’t the right fit for Somerville right now,” he said, “but we remain interested in new ways to improve customer convenience.”
The thing is, though, that despite boasting a website that’s optimized for mobile, the user must still, DeMaina added, “plug in the ticket information online.”
That’s exactly the kind of hindrance TicketZen allows users to avoid.
Screenshot via TicketZen
“The City of Somerville’s website (like many other municipal websites) requires a citizen to spend an unnecessary amount of time in order to pay a parking ticket,” said TicketZen co-founder Ryan Neu. “TicketZen was built to alleviate this problem, which is especially important for citizens who receive multiple tickets per year. For reference, in Boston, 50% of our users are repeat users.”
The benefits of a partnership between the city and TicketZen are threefold: the city offers a favorable solution to its residents, residents would be waived of the $2 user fee for a pilot period, and TicketZen get’s some promotional love by having its name printed on the ticket.
It’s a win-win-win solution for everybody.
In fact, based on TicketZen’s current customer requests, Somerville has the highest number of requests in the Greater Boston Area, followed by Cambridge, Newton and Brookline.
To be clear, Somervillians can still use TicketZen as the vehicle for a parking ticket payment transaction. But, without the partnership of the city, all of the aforementioned benefits, as well as the potential to help bolster Somerville’s reputation as an innovative city, fall by the wayside.
“We prioritize the cities that we support based on public interest. After launching in Boston, it became clear that we needed to support Somerville,” said Neu. “Having the ability to pay a Boston parking ticket the same way as a Somerville parking ticket is a value add for citizens in the Boston metro. We are optimistic that the City of Somerville will help us promote TicketZen by printing the ‘pay with TicketZen’ option on the parking ticket.”
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