ParkMe is taking its parking information app to the streets.
The Santa Monica company recently lifted the veil on the newest version of its iPhone app, which gives people information about open street parking spaces.
It’s a new feature for the app, which previously only listed the number of available spaces in parking lots and garages.
With the update, the app gives users a live map of the available metered street parking in downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica. The ParkMe map shows free spaces in green and occupied ones in red. It also gives hourly prices for the meters.
The chance to get real-time parking data within two of L.A.’s busiest areas was a big deal for ParkMe co-founders Sam Friedman and Alex Israel – both native Angelenos.
“This is the first step in solving more than parking problems,” Friedman said. “Searching for spaces causes 50 percent of urban gridlock, on top of all the gas money driving around. Our app can solve that.”
Information about the available street spaces comes from underground sensors the city installed next to the parking meters. These devices can tell when there’s a car parked at a meter and transmits the information to the city.
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation has given ParkMe and San Francisco’s Streetline, which makes the parking app Parker, access to the sensors’ info. It allows the apps to keep the parking situation in an area current – ParkMe refreshes its map every 40 seconds.
For the city, these apps are helping it reach a benchmark set out in the L.A. ExpressPark program: keep the street parking in downtown 70 to 90 percent occupied. That level strikes a balance between having enough money flow through the meters while still having traffic flow through the streets.
“Rather than come into downtown and going around and around aimlessly to find a parking space, people can use the apps to sort this out ahead of time,” said Dan Mitchell, the senior transportation engineer at the department.
ParkMe doesn’t make any money directly from its collaboration with Los Angeles and Santa Monica. The company’s revenue comes from selling parking passes and coupons for parking garages through the app. It also licenses some of its data to digital navigation companies, including TomTom and TeleNav, which is owned by AT&T. ParkMe execs say any information they can use to boost parking technology is a long time coming.
“Parking is one of the last industries to go online,” Friedman said. “It’s an archaic and fragmented industry but tremendously lucrative. It’s ripe to go online.”
Party Bus
It may seem odd to promote the L.A. tech scene with a converted party bus. But that’s the fundraising project sponsored by SiliconBeachLA.com, a new information and news site promoting the local tech community.
They’ve already got a bus – that came from the site’s co-founder Jeremy Gocke. He’s bringing it over from his other business venture PimpIt.com, which sells club apparel. The group is raising money to redesign the vehicle, which according to pictures posted on the fundraising page, is currently emblazoned with the Pimpit.com logo and features red velour curtains, a wet-bar and a three-person hot-tub.
SiliconBeachLA is using Indiegogo to raise $15,000 to give the bus a look more suitable to the L.A. startup scene, though there are no posted sketches of what that would be. Plans are to drive the finished rolling advertisement to Austin’s South by Southwest festival in March.
Staff reporter Tom Dotan can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225 ext. 263.
