Terrible Labs, the maker of parking ticket payment app TicketZen, is partnering with PayByPhone‘s municipal parking payment service to bring its technology to the 9 million registered users on the PayByPhone platform.
TicketZen launched with the goal of making paying for tickets less of a pain, and now that the company is aligning itself with PayPoint’s flagship PayByPhone product, the company can roll out in hundreds of new locations.
People can now pay for parking tickets using the umbrella of services they use to pay for parking.
“Partnering with PayByPhone allows TicketZen to scale its mobile parking ticket solution to PayByPhone’s rapidly growing customer base,” said Ryan Neu, TicketZen co-founder in a statement. “Both companies have adopted a mobile-first approach to simplify the parking experience.”
In the US alone, parking ticket collection is a multi-billion dollar industry.
For 2012, the last year for which TicketZen had available data, Boston issued 1.5 million tickets and collected $62.2 million in revenue, Washington saw $92.6 million come into its coffers thanks to parking tickets, and New York added $567.6 million to its own municipal haul thanks to slips handed out by the NYPD. The city that never sleeps actually issues about 10 million tickets per year.
TicketZen’s consumer app is not linked to specific municipalities, which means it can integrate with all of the disparate systems that comprise the fragmented ticket payment landscape for cities. The company says that 52% of its users have paid for more than one ticket, and that the bulk of its users are on iPhones rather than Android devices (to the tune of 85% of all payments).
What are the most common tickets that drivers are getting popped for? According to the app, it’s meter fee expiration, parking in a restricted resident area, or street cleaning.
TicketZen isn’t the only player in the parking ticket payment market. In 2010, Xerox (yes that Xerox), bought Affiliated Computers Services to get into the parking market — including ticketing. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington are all customers and its technology powers the ticket payment websites for many of those cities.
In Cambridge, Mass. the two companies even went toe to toe over their payment systems.