Mobile parking services are becoming more widely available with New York, Phoenix and Latrobe, PA, among the locations that will be letting drivers pay for parking via their smartphones.

Drivers wanting to park at Imperial Parking garages around New York can use the Pango application to start their online parking meter from their car, order their car to pick-up and pay for their parking. The towns of Auburn, NY, and Latrobe, PA, will be using Pango?s Street Parking system to enable drivers to pay for parking by placing a call from the smartphone, sending an SMS or using the Pango app.

?If you are a commuter into NYC for example, or if you are a driver where you depend on your car to park during the day, a parking app is a very important app that is probably going to be one of your top 40 apps,? said Neil Edwards, president of Pango USA, New York.

?This is because paying for parking, ordering your car, finding parking, this is something that we do that helps you be more efficient with your everyday life and literally cuts minutes to an hour out of your day and makes that part of your life a lot easier,? he said.

Parking coupons
Pango, which is based in Israel, is quickly expanding in the United States, pointing to how smartphones can making everyday activities such as parking in garages and the on the street more convenient for users.

The Pango app is in pilot at several of the 110 garages owned by Imperial Parking Systems ? the largest privately owned garage company in NYC. Users are able to park their car, start the online parking meter and order their car for pick up via their phone.

Users will also receive alerts and coupons directly from the company.

For customers, using their phones to pay for parking, this means they do not have to wait in line while their car is being retrieved.

Based on initial feedback from this pilot program, Pango is working on adding a button for reserving a parking spot at a garage from the app.

On-the-street parking
In Phoenix, AZ, Pango has partnered with Red Development?s CityScape ? a high-rise mixed use development consisting of residential, retail, office and hotel components ? to enable users to pay for parking, open and close garage gates, validate their parking from retailers and receive special offers from retailers. Pango is also being implemented with the American Valet garage system in downtown Phoenix.

The Pango app has also been live in Towson, MD, and Latrobe, PA for several months.

Auburn, NY, and Latrobe, PA, are the first two cities in the U.S. to have agreements to use the Pango Street Parking system for on-the-street parking.

In Auburn, city officials want to use the app to inform users about upcoming town festivals and to provide incentive-based parking.

Pango operates in 47 cities worldwide, serves more than one million active accounts and processes approximately 2 million transactions per month. In Israel, 89 percent of the parking payments in the country are paid using Pango.

?There are literally two or three types of apps out there,? Mr. Edwards said. ?There are those apps that allow you to consume content and those apps that allow you do to things that make your life easier.

?You see people having those apps in close proximity either on their home screen or one swipe, two swipes or three swipes away,? he said.

?Those useful life-changing apps, once you start to use them, they will always be at your fingertips. It is like your favorite newspaper or your Starbucks app if you go to Starbucks every day.?

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York