In Clayton, two parking apps might be better than one. The city this week approved an agreement with ParkMobile, adding the widely-used parking app alongside its existing vendor Passport.
At Clayton’s City Council meeting Tuesday, city officials said offering ParkMobile should reduce friction for visitors who are already using the app in nearby municipalities, such as the city of St. Louis and University City. Columbia, Rolla, St. Joseph, and Kansas City are also among the locations in Missouri currently using ParkMobile, which the company says is available in more than 700 cities nationwide.
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“I think it makes it more accessible to people,” Clayton Mayor Bridget McAndrew said during the meeting. “Because people who are used to ParkMobile, they come in and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to download the Passport app.’ I know there was a reason we got Passport in the beginning, but ParkMobile maybe has done a better job of marketing themselves to other communities.”
Clayton’s contract with Passport dates back to 2016—“a millennium ago in parking,” Gary Carter, the city’s director of economic development, said during the meeting. The agreement remains in effect, but has been amended to remove Passport’s exclusivity clause.
The three-year agreement with ParkMobile authorizes the company to operate its payment system citywide, and automatically renews in one-year increments unless either side gives notice of nonrenewal. ParkMobile will collect a fee of 15 percent per parking transaction—or at least 63 cents—paid by users. The company says it will provide signage and stickers at no cost to Clayton.
David Gipson, Clayton’s city manager, says the goal is to have ParkMobile operational before the end of the year.
“This is a step in the right direction for us,” Gipson said at the meeting. “We need to get further and further away from quarters, if we can. The more solutions we have like this, the better.”
Gipson said maintaining coin-fed meters is becoming increasingly expensive and labor intensive. “The last time we went out to bid … almost two-thirds of the respondents to our banking proposal declined to take our business because of the number of quarters that they would have to process,” he said at the meeting.
Even so, councilmembers stressed a need to accommodate those who can’t readily access an app like ParkMobile or Passport. City officials expressed interest in revisiting the conversation about modernizing parking in the coming weeks and months.
