UPDATE: So I accidentally ran into someone tonight who explained the issue to me. I guess the ‘APP’ is NOT the problem, I guess the problem is the app is not communicating with our parking meters correctly. I guess the city is not using a very good telecom (not Verizon) for the communications to the meters which is causing the issue. This surprises me since the city just rolled out 5G with Verizon.
They finally announced today, but not until some folks on FB caught them. It seems to be happening at city hall a lot these days from potholes and floods to transparency, every time someone busts them they announce they are working on the issue;
The City soft launched the app in late 2018 for downtown parking ramps. Since then, the reach of the app has expanded to include many downtown parking meters. Soft launching the app to the public will help the City gain appropriate feedback to ensure potential bugs and issues are worked out before the official rollout, planned for August 2019.
So I guess the city’s innovation department is using us as lab rats for not just 5G, but now parking apps. I will post later about how Bloomberg is using our mayor as a lab rat. What I find interesting is that this gives meter maids a heads up of what meters are expired. Maybe this was a revenue idea they wanted to keep secret.
This was the response from the city;
Jason ReisdorferI appreciate everyone’s passion with regards to this app. We think it’s going to be a big win for the downtown scene. This app wasn’t built on the backs of the taxpayers and we’re not paying to have it developed. This is a free add-on to the pay by CC meters the city purchased (before my time). We compared several similar products, this one is the best option for our citizens for several reasons. We have been working closely with the app developers to work out the bugs and to get the locations geolocated properly. If you followed me at all with the ‘SF App’ launch, you will know that I promoted the heck out of it once we were ready…but it was live for several weeks in public beta before it was launched because I wanted thorough testing before a bunch of people jumped on and had issues and a bad user experience. There’s no reason that we’d want to keep something this awesome a secret…I just wanted it to work properly. I think KSFY is running a story tonight, and now that the cat is out of the bag on this, we’ll launch a presser tomorrow…but like anything new, I’d ask for your patience as we’re about 2 weeks ahead of schedule for when we wanted this thing pushed out full scale. I’m confident all you smart people can help us work out the bugs, so send me any feedback you have while using it and we’ll pass them along to the developers. Thanks for all the support! #OneSiouxFalls
Great video here;