Parking Kitty

This app was recommended to me by a parking enforcement officer, after she saw me struggling to get out of my car, grabbing my crutches; oh, and did I say it was raining?! As someone with difficulty walking, this app is a godsend. For a small service charge, well worth it! I’d rather pay this small charge than fall and get hurt trying to get to the meter. Very easy to set up and use, just follow the prompts. If at an appointment, date, class or game; you don’t have to rush back to your car, just pick up your phone and open the app, put more money in the “meter”, right from where you are.

Download the app, enter your license plate, the zone number you enter is listed on your parking meter, then you click pay and you are all set (stores your cc info). AMAZING. All those rainy and cold days of running back and forth from your car to the meter and back to your car. And also the new meters have you enter your license plate number which slows things down quite a bit. This app is great. To the few that are complaining the app isn't loud enough at reminding them about their meter - it's called "Alarm" and just set your own timer on your phone for yourself. Remember the best part: pay from your phone and pay as you would like. No more overpaying meters and panicking that you ran out.

When it works, it's great. Unfortunately, the parkingkitty app is not an entirely automated system, but rather relies on human factors outside of the app-users control. When those humans make mistakes, it is the user of the parkingkitty app who pays the price. Specifically: i used the app parking in downtown Portland. I did everything correctly. Well, when the parking police came around THEY entered my license plate incorrectly into their "verification system". When they did this, they found no record of me having paid. So i got a ticket. So now i have wasted 45 minutes on the phone getting this problem corrected. (Still not resolved, but every indication that it will be.) My time is valuable, and i don't need this.... (BTW, this was the first time i had used the parking kitty app, so for me this is a "one out of one" failure. Hard to tell how often this happens, but based on my phone calls to the parking police, this wasn't the first time...) ADDENDUM: The developer just added a note saying something like: "email us, and we will help". Well, i did contact parking kitty support when i got the ticket. All they did was give me the phone number to the Portland Parking Ticket "help" desk.... It was still in my court to resolve and my wasted time on the phone... And by the way, it still isn't resolved. I have to call back again and spend more time to check the status, despite the parking police saying they would call me back the next day (it's been 3 business days) to confirm ticket cancellation...