Parking in Calgary
Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve written. I’ve been busy, sure, but it’s mostly just laziness.
I recently moved from Chicago, IL, USA to Calgary, AB, Canada. Jury’s still out on whether or not trading the El for the C-Train, pizza and hot dogs for Vietnamese subs, or the lake for the mountains (which have their own lakes!) is worth it …. but one thing’s for sure: I’m really happy with my new job as Usability Specialist with a company called SMART Technologies, responsible for many excellent educational technology hardware and software products, most popularly the SMART Board.
But this post is not about SMART (maybe I’ll write one in the future), it’s about parking in Calgary (something I try to not have to do too much of, but there’s just no way around using a car here). Nothing too insightful here, just a funny parking experience I had and also a kudos to the city-wide parking system, ParkPlus.
The Bad
It took about a million weeks for my car to ship from Chicago -> Calgary (which is funny as my stuff got here in about one). Once it arrived here, I had to visit around eight different places (government offices, registries, dealerships) in order for my car to be blessed as kosher in Alberta. In any event, there was a period where I had a rental car and my imported Volkswagen and had to strategically shuttle them around so I could take the latter to get inspected and then use the former to get home. A funny thing happened when I tried to park them both in the same lot, using my credit card in the automated parking machine. I swiped my card, paid for a couple hours worth of parking for one car, then went to dip my card again, and got the following error message.
It took my quite a while to figure out what the heck was going on here. I eventually just assumed that my credit card info was stored in some central parking database which doesn’t allow one to have multiple simultaneous sessions on the same card. Understandable … it’s an edge use case …. but I still couldn’t figure out what was the rationale for disallowing this. But … what about that error message, huh? Gotta be one of the best I’ve seen. How about ‘Session in Progress’ or ‘Try Different Card’ ? To me, “Impossible Payment” implies that I tried to pay for -i or 1/0 hours of parking time, or attempted to pay with my blockbuster card. I scrounged up enough loonies to pay with cold hard, cash. It didn’t seem to have any problem with that.
The Good
Not that I enjoy paying for parking — especially at work — but if I have to pay, I want it to be as painless as possible. The ParkPlus system makes parking so easy, you don’t even car that you’re getting ripped off!
Here’s how it works. These payment boxes have sprung up all over the city, and many of the streets have signs with zone numbers posted along them. You park your car somewhere, find the nearest box enter the zone number where you’ve parked your car, dip your credit card and you’re done. Pretty easy, and ingenious for ParkPlus because adding a new zone is as easy as putting up a pole with a number — no need to install a quarter-based parking meter for every parking spot.
Well, the streets around my work building are Park-Plus-ified, and I’d seen signs advertising a way to pay with your mobile. So one day, instead of walking the extra 250 feet past the front door to the machine, I decided I’d pay with my mobile. I navigated to parkplus.ca with my mobile phone and found it to be not a mobile-optimized site, and I was a bit confused by this. When I got to my desk, I spent some more time navigating around the site from my browser on my PC, and as it turns out, you actually need to call a phone number from your phone to pay for parking — how adorably quaint!! The website is only used to create an account and for you to add money to that account.
Paying exorbitant fees every month to Fido for use of their mobile internet, I was a bit upset that there wasn’t a web site — or better yet a mobile app — I could use to do this, but I thought I’d put some money in my ParkPlus account and give it a go using the ‘ol Dialer app on my Android Phone. It’s a pretty fluid interaction:
- Place the call
- Press 1 to create a new parking session or cancel current one
- Enter zone number
- System reads it back, press 1 to confirm
- It thanks me, tells me when my session expires and hangs up.
Total time expended ….. 33 seconds. That’s pretty great (as great as paying for parking gets), and quite the relief after having used Fido’s ridiculously inefficient voicemail system. I hope to post more on this later.
Sad fun fact of the day: ParkPlus is at the top of my mobile’s automatically generated ‘Favorites’ list (based on frequency of calls).
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