Vancouver Parking Meters

Parking in the city of Vancouver is always a bit of a nightmare. As a driver your options are basically to park in an overpriced lot for $6-10 per hour or $15-$40 for the day, or park on the street with tight time restrictions and a high price. If you’re lucky enough to find a parking spot you need to load the meter with change, or setup a mobile account with Verrus to pay for the meter.

I really like the mobile payment option as pocket change isn’t common for me these days as I pay for most things with debit and credit cards. The problem I’ve had is that I have changed license plates, cars, and phone numbers over the past few years, and now when I try to pay for parking using the Verrus mobile payment option it malfunctions and sends me through a frustrating series of menu options forcing me to give-up and run to my meeting, which usually results in a parking ticket.

On this trip to Vancouver I actually had change to load the meter, but then the thing jammed prompting an epic fail message. Sweet, free parking!

On researching all of this I also realized that I could go online to create and manage my parking meter account at the Verrus website, which should make future parking in Vancouver and other participating cities much easier because doing it via touch tone phone menus is certainly not time effective.

As much as I think the Verrus mobile phone pay system is a step in the right direction for parking meter payment, I think future iterations of the platform will likely evolve to become a more visually based system. Audio menus and touch tone phone options are a bit prehistoric.

Managing your account and paying for parking via a Blackberry or iPhone app, or touch-pay type interface will be the future of meter payment.