Secret Weapon in Mall Battle: Parking Apps

She checks the parking lots on her ParkMe smartphone app “so that I can see what I’m up against, or if I need to change my plans.” If a lot is below 90 percent full, the trip is on. Her favorite, not far from her workplace, is a garage at the Santa Monica Place mall, where sensors and lights guide her to a specific open space.

“It’s a daily battle,” said Ms. Scott, 29, the founder of Laudville, a social technology start-up. “Anything to make it easier makes a really big difference.”

The fight for a mall parking spot, long a necessary evil of Black Friday, is growing easier thanks to the proliferation of new technologies, from apps and sensors to color-coded lights and electronic boards.

It’s one way that malls and shopping districts are trying to lure customers away from their computers, into the realm of their brick-and-mortar stores.

“What happens when there’s no spots? People drive around and become frustrated,” said Kathy Grannis, a spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation. “Who wants to start their shopping experience frustrated?”

ParkMe, which tracks more than 28,000 locations worldwide, has emerged as a mainstay app for mall customers navigating the nation’s parking lots. With the app, they can find the closest and least expensive lots, as well as alternative garage entrances. The app’s user base surged 97 percent in the past year, and it is adding hundreds of garages to its database.

“If there’s a way to get in off the beaten path, you can reduce stress,” said Sam Friedman, ParkMe’s co-founder and chief executive.

The app’s technology is simple enough: a magnetic loop at the garage clocks the number of times the gate lifts to admit or release a car, Mr. Friedman said. ParkMe also lets a customer reserve a spot in certain locations, like the Shore Hotel down the road from Santa Monica Place. Ms. Scott said she used that service during busy summer months.

Other parking apps are gaining traction as well. Parkopedia, which is linked to 26,000 lots in North America, also allows users to search parking sites, availability and prices using their smartphones. QuickPay plans to start in hundreds of malls in the United States next year to help shoppers pay for garage and metered spots and valet services from their smartphone.

“Parking is the gateway to the shopping experience,” QuickPay’s founder, Barney Pell, said. “It can mean the success or failure of your whole business.”

Customers expect more than they did 10 years ago, said Casey Jones, a vice president for institutional services at Standard Parking, the Chicago-based provider of parking facility management services, and a past chairman of the International Parking Institute.

“They want real-time information, they want price choices and they want to be directed to an open space,” Mr. Jones said.

Jessi Molohon, a 23-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, is one such customer. She said she uses the ParkWhiz app when traveling to stores in downtown Houston or at the Houston Galleria to help find garages and compare prices.

“Parking can be anywhere from $6 to $12 on the same street, so I want to make sure I’m not overspending on parking when I’m going to overspend on shopping,” Ms. Molohon said.

An app called A Parking Spot lets Ms. Molohon pin her favorite parking spaces on a Google map so that she can navigate there next time.

“I have it down to a routine,” she said. “There are some spots I know of that are just easy to get in and out of that will help me save time and avoid the holiday traffic just a little.”

There is no data available on the number of mall garages outfitted with sensors to help keep track of vacant spots, but analysts say the rate of adoption for mall infrastructure and the number of parking apps is doubling or tripling year over year.

Taubman Centers, which owns and manages 22 malls in the United States, installed sensors in the garages in two of its centers to show shoppers on which floors they could find open parking spots. Installation costs $50,000 to $100,000 per location.

But parking is only half the battle. When a customer is ready to leave, there is the matter of finding the car.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly the name of one app. It is ParkWhiz, not Parking Whiz.

Digital Domain: Smart Parking Has a Learning Curve, Too

In its current state, however, “smart parking” is in some ways little different from regular parking. The term refers to a beguiling technology, now being tested in several cities, that uses sensors to determine whether a particular spot on the street or in a parking garage is occupied or vacant. When a car has overstayed its allotted time, the technology can also send the information to a parking enforcement officer with ticket book in hand.

The sensors’ data can also be used to adjust parking prices, using higher rates to create more turnover on the busiest blocks and lower prices to draw drivers to blocks with underused spaces.

Smart-parking technology for on-street spaces is expensive, and still in its early stages. The largest examples are pilot projects with costs covered primarily by grants from the federal Department of Transportation. In San Francisco, the SFpark pilot project uses sensors from StreetSmart Technology for 7,000 of the city’s 28,000 meters. In Los Angeles, LA Express Park has installed sensors from Streetline for 6,000 parking spots on downtown streets.

Cities are marketing the programs as experiments in using demand-based pricing to reduce traffic congestion — the kind caused by circling drivers desperately seeking parking spots — and to make more spaces available at any specific time. Drivers are encouraged to use mobile apps to check parking availability and pricing, though coverage is not universal. Parker, for example, from Streetline, gives detailed information about on-street parking for Los Angeles, but not for San Francisco.

SFpark is using “smart pricing” to achieve a target of having one parking space available most of the time in the areas it covers, says Jay Primus, the SFpark program manager. SFpark, he says, “de-emphasizes inconvenient time limits and instead uses smart pricing” to achieve those targets. The same spot, for example, may have different parking rates for different times of day. That intraday pricing is adjusted at multimonth intervals, but theoretically, it could be altered on the fly, depending on availability at any given hour.

One way to increase availability would be to use sensor technology to deter drivers from the tactic of staying parked in one place and repeatedly feeding the meter. Or a system might reset the meter automatically when a vehicle leaves a spot, so any remaining time is zeroed out. But meter resetting is “a fairly politically charged issue,” says Zia Yusuf, the C.E.O. of Streetline, and his company doesn’t provide it. (Many cities have found that midblock payment kiosks that replace individual meters solve this problem handily.)

In San Francisco, the sensor technology installed by Streetsmart Technology has been bedeviled by electromagnetic interference from overhead trolley lines. Mr. Primus says the vehicle-detection sensing is only about 90 percent accurate.

Daniel E. Mitchell, a senior transportation engineer who manages LA Express Park for the City of Los Angeles, says the accuracy of his program’s sensors has been in the mid-90 percent range, but he sees that as inadequate for automatically issuing tickets. Even if the sensors were 97 percent accurate, Mr. Mitchell says, “you’d have 3 percent of your customers experiencing a problem and that would be too many.”

Smart-parking apps aren’t as useful as might be expected for drivers seeking open spots. When a parking space is vacated, there is a short delay before a sensor’s signal moves through the wireless network, reaches the centralized system and finally arrives on a driver’s phone. But if other cars are circling, even a 30-second or one-minute wait can be too long.

As for parking enforcement, San Francisco and Los Angeles have begun to use the sensor technology to dispatch officers to cars that have stayed past their limits. That’s far more efficient that having officers roam streets in search of random meter violations.

Program officials in both cities say that they don’t yet know how many more tickets are being issued as a result of the new systems. But opportunities for “improved enforcement operations,” as a Streetline promotional video delicately refers to it, seem enormous. Mr. Yusuf says that without smart parking, “no more than 8 to 10 percent of parking payment violations are ticketed.”

AS smart parking spreads, I’ll miss the comfort of knowing that when I accidentally stay a few minutes too long in a parking spot, I may get a reprieve. After all, the enforcement officer two blocks away still has to check every meter between us before discovering my mistake.

When I shared those feelings with Mr. Yusuf, he pointed out that the technology could distinguish between those whose paid time elapsed just a few minutes previously and those who have been parked for hours. He argues that cities “want to attract more drivers to the downtown area, and it is the blatant offenders they want to target.”

Making such distinctions would be smart enforcement.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.