Ok, this is how it’s done in Helsinki – how to pay for parking. Pretty basic things, but still quite old fashioned..and expensive, at least in my opinion. Here is a list of the “most advanced” solutions and the costs to use them. 1 is based on a gadget, 2 are phone operated. I’ll do a comparison in the end. In addition to these there are of course private parking installations where you pay onetime fees or monthly deals but I’m not going to talk about them.
Comet – a personal parking gadget that you attach to your car. You may buy a machine from Comet for 69€ and then accessories to it that they recoomend you to have, at least the mini-usb cable (6,90€). The mini-usb cable is of-course usable with just windows…
When loading money to it, they charge you 10%, but the parking costs 10% less/hour so that kind of equals it. Then there is of course also the 5€ annual fee. The Comet works only in Helsinki at this moment. The Comet is not linked with a specified vehicle, so 1 Comet may be used with several vehicles.
NextPark – a phone based parking system. First you have to register on their website (only in Finnish) and then upload credit to your account. You may link many vehicles to one registration. When all that is done the user experience kicks in, like this:
- first call a number
- then give the of the vehicle
- then give the number of the city – Helsinki is 4 (of course it is?!?)
- then give the number of the parking area (can be seen from the parking sign)
- then give the maximum amount of hours that you are allowed to park
- then the time you want to leave (you will get a SMS 15 minutes before the time ends)
- then you can park
You may continue to park for a longer period, but you must call a number and a machine will ask you if you want to continue or stop.
The pricing for parking is the same as paying by cash. No fees are collected when loading money to your account, but there is a monthly fee of 1,5€ and for every booking they take a 0,18€ fee. Calling is priced as a regular call depending on the carrier.
EasyPark (Parkit) - a call-to-park service that work almost exactly the same way as NextPark. The difference in these 2 services is that with EasyPark you don’t have to put credit to your account. You can choose to get in 3 different ways: the phone bill (not all carriers), to your credit card or with a separate invoice (this will cost you 2,5€ extra per invoice).
The costs of using EasyPark will be: cost for the parking, a fee for each parking event (0,50€ in Helsinki) depending on the area and 0,16€ per order. They have a registering fee of 6,50€ and a monthly fee of 3€.
Summary
The first impression is that it is quite expensive. Renting a parkingplace costs around 100€/month in Helsinki (I guess?), and then we are talking about a indoor place without any timelimits etc. And the place is always free. Let’s do a small calculation:
- 3 parking events a week á 4 hours in a month (4 weeks) = 48 hours
- 12 parking events
- pricing is 0,80€ / hour
If I’d pay by cash, it would cost me 48*0,80€ = 38,40€.
With Comet the parking would cost me the same 38,40€ as with cash. Let’s assume that the Comet gadget lifetime is 2 years and that we also have the recommended usb-cable. With those hardware investments the monthly costs would be: 3,16€, making the monthly parking cost 41,56€.
NextPark costs come from the number of booking events and the monthly fee. In our case that makes: 38,40€ + 1,5€ + 12*0,18€ = 42.06€.
EasyPark parking has the same kind of costs as NextPark but EasyPark has different costs for the parking events in different areas. In Helsinki they are 0,50€/event. The costs sum up to: 38,40€ + 3€ + 12*0,50€ = 47,40€.
Findings:
- none of the systems are “modern” in my opinion
- hardware is cheaper than service, but who wants to carry around yet another thing
- NextPark and EasyPark – identical service but not pricing
- parking controllers check if you have paid your parking by sms
- this I still have to double check
In the next part – are there better solutions somewhere else as services or solutions.
