Jananas

Before I get too deep into this post, I thought I’d make it clear that I haven’t done any research to see if anyone else has done this. For all I know it already exists and has been done well. I’m doing this more as a thought experiment – to flex my mental muscles and to think about how things could be done differently to make them better.

First, the story. I was walking to my weekly Stitch ‘n Bitch last night and I saw a parking ticket lying forlornly on the sidewalk. I’m going to make the assumption that it hadn’t been paid (it was on the street) – so there was lost revenue and potentially a repercussion down the road for the person who didn’t pay. It made me think.

What would stop someone from paying the ticket.

It could get blown off the car before someone even notices it (can’t do much about that). More than likely the parking tickets gets stuffed in a pocket and forgotten. Or taken inside and left on the coffee table/desk/by the front door/etc. and again… forgotten.

If it is remembered, then someone either has to write a cheque and mail it in (technology, what?!?), go pay in person (value of time, say what?!?), or pay online. At least with the City of Toronto, it is pretty easy to pay online. In fact, all details are covered here in case you were curious. You have to enter the ticket number [as an aside, why are the parking ticket reference numbers never, ever, ever in the system? I pay and sort of hope that it gets connected on the backend somewhere.], enter your card information, get a confirmation code, and done. Not hard.

But its still one more step. And between getting the ticket and paying for it, there is a whole lot of time where the person has the opportunity to forget about it or lose it.

How do you make it easier?

The easier way to, well, make it easier is to cut out the chance to forget. What about a mobile app (for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry) that would allow you to immediately pay the ticket. One minute of your time and its done. No more worrying if its been done, no more surprises when you have to renew your license and you can’t because of unpaid parking tickets.

Yes, with an internet enabled device you could search for how to pay the ticket but I think that with that extra step people would just put it into the mental bucket of ‘do it at home’. With an application, they can tap a button on screen and get taken directly to the online ticket payment page for the city they are in (based on gps of course). If you wanted to get fancier, you could create a mobile payment page to collect the information even faster to make the process take even less time.

It wouldn’t change the behaviour of the people who never pay their parking tickets, but I do think that you’d collect more revenue from the people who might have good intentions but otherwise forget. I don’t know if there would be any room for revenue (i.e. City’s might let you take a cut of the current credit card fee added to online payments if you can demonstrated increased payment rates) or if it would make sense for each City to roll out their own app.

If it was one single app, you could start with your local major city. Then roll out to the surrounding suburbs (where people would also be likely to go). Then roll out to other major cities. That way a person would only need one app for everywhere they’d travel and it would just be taken care of. It might also mean that Cities would get more revenue from non-residents as they’d be more in the habit of paying (well, maybe…).

What do you think?

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