New Paltz officials continue to transition away from mechanical meters

There’s a cost to providing the vehicle storage called “parking,” and more of that cost is being shifted to the user as Village of New Paltz officials continue to transition away from mechanical meters. Trustees spoke at their September 27 meeting with Ron Ross of Park Mobile, the company behind the app of the same name which allows paying without carrying quarters. During this check-in about how the app is being received, Ross spoke about the costs that come from this service, all of which are borne by the user. 

Village officials want to continue to collect a dollar an hour for parking, but with additional fees that can substantially increase the cost to the user — at its highest, nearly tripling a 25-cent fee for 15 minutes to 72 cents, after fees. There’s 30 cents that goes to the vendor, 15 cents for the payment processor and three percent for the bank that issued the payment card. 

All three of these fees are tacked onto any payment via Park Mobile. As Ross explained, a driver who pays for two hours at the onset would get charged the first two fees — 30 and 15 cents — plus three percent, but someone who pays for an hour and later adds another hour through the app would get hit with all three charges again. The first driver would pay $2.56, and the second $2.98, for the same amount of time. 

The idea of being able to charge for just 15 minutes was revelatory to the trustees, who had had the impression that a dollar was the minimum charge through this service. Ross assured them that it was not. 

Unlike with mechanical meters, it’s impossible with this system to park in a spot that was vacated early, and get to use that remaining time. The app does include a countdown feature, which alerts the user to pending expiration of their time. One does not need a smart phone to use the Park Mobile service, but one does need a credit or debit card, and a phone to use for texting or calling at the very least. 

Trustee Stana Weisburd wondered how this might impact someone without any phone, or who couldn’t get service in order to pay. Fellow trustee Michele Zipp compared not possessing a phone to not having a quarter handy to put in a meter, which appeared to mollify Weisburd. 

Mayor Tim Rogers expressed satisfaction with this transition, after years of searching for an appropriate vendor. The mayor noted that the parking fees aren’t enough to pay the enforcement personnel or the time needed to maintain the meters and empty them of coins. The parking kiosks need fixing more frequently that Rogers would like, which also adds cost. Expanding the use of meters “we’d probably need to double or triple the cost of parking,” the mayor said. That’s why officials are pivoting to using the app alone in some lower-traffic areas, eliminating the one way of cutting the parking fee down by as much as two-thirds. 

The app’s usage suggests that it’s being used throughout the village. Ross reported that there have been 1,467 transactions per week for the village’s 316 spaces, but wasn’t able to say immediately how many of those transactions were to renew for the same spot.