A smartphone parking-meter payment app developed by three University of Arizona graduates will roll out across El Paso next month.
Tucson startup Park Genius has partnered with parking-meter-industry leader Duncan Solutions to adapt its cashless parking application to 1,982 parking meters in the West Texas city, with a full rollout planned by Oct. 1, said Thomas Maguire, co-founder of Park Genius.
Teaming up with Milwaukee-based Duncan is an important step for Park Genius, said Maguire, who founded the company in 2012 with Austin Weiss and Ross Shanken, fellow alumnus of the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program at the UA Eller College of Management.
“It’s an opportunity for us to scale up at a faster pace, and that always helps,” Maguire said.
Founded in 1936, Duncan Solutions is a leading provider of parking management products and services such as credit-card parking meters, enforcement systems and citation processing, and has more than 2,000 clients.
Park Genius (www.parkgenius.com) piloted its app in Tucson for three months last year and is teamed with Duncan to vie for a pending city of Tucson parking-meter contract.
The application “Park El Paso,” which will be free to download in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, allows users to pay for parking electronically with a credit or debit card account.
While parking payment apps like PayPoint’s PaybyPhone already are offered in cities across the nation, Park Genius is designed to also work with older, coin-only meters through the use of unique parking-space identifiers. With such coin meters, purchased parking time isn’t added on the meter readout but is updated in a central database accessed by parking officers.
The El Paso rollout includes both coin-only meters and those that accept credit or debit cards, in the latter case allowing the meter readouts to be updated immediately, Maguire said.
Park Genius also is refining its offering with new features.
In El Paso, local businesses will have the opportunity to advertise for specific events and promotions through the parking app, and merchants will be able to offer their customers validation for parking by depositing coupon codes into a wallet account.
Future releases of the Park Genius app will include technology to help motorists find open parking as well, the company said.
“The ‘Park El Paso’ mobile app is going to be a great tool not only for our motorists, but for the prosperity of our local businesses and economy as a whole,” said Paul Stresow, who heads the city’s parking system as director of El Paso’s International Bridges Department.
Maguire said the El Paso project provides welcome revenue for the startup company, though he declined to disclose the value of the deal.
The company hopes to win the Tucson bid with Duncan to bring the technology to the Old Pueblo, Maguire said.
“We’re excited about the opportunity to offer the app in El Paso, but Tucson is our home base, and we hope to offer the service here.”
Tucson plans to replace its old coin-operated meters with electronic meters that will accept payment cards, as well as smartphone payments through services like Park Genius and PayByPhone. A decision on the city bid request for parking meters, including mobile payment systems, is expected in the next few weeks.
