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Parking app getting cheaper in Grand Rapids, while popularity growing

Parking in Downtown Grand Rapids is about to get cheaper for drivers who use the parking smartphone app. The Grand Rapids Mobile GR and Parking Services Department announced a new contract with Parkmobile, a smartphone application that allows customers to use their mobile phones to pay for metered parking throughout the city. The new contract will reduce a customer’s convenience fee by 43 percent, from $.35 to. $.15 per transaction. 

“We’re excited about it, we’re excited that we are able to offer this .15 transaction fee, and we just hope people will use it,” Barbra Singleton the parking meter operations/DASH manager for the city of Grand Rapids said. Since the city first tested the app nine years ago, usage has grown every year, with over 400,000 transactions in 2016. Singleton says this year will easily beat that number.

“I’d say probably in the 600,000 range,” she said. “A lot of people haven’t used, but they are being introduced to it just for the convenience of it.”

The city’s contract with Parkmobile runs for three years and allows customers to pay for any meter in Grand Rapids. While the contract reduces the user’s convenience fee, it does not reduce the cost of the meter itself.

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