Parking Kitty To Purrfect The Parking Process In Portland

PORTLAND, OR — The Bureau of Transportation on Thursday announced the launch of a new smartphone app that could make parking in Portland a whole lot easier.

Eliminating the need to hassle with parking kiosks, Parking Kitty allows users to pay for parking and monitor, add reminders for, and extend parking expiration times from their cell phones. Parking apps like this are used by more than 300 agencies at more than 3,000 locations around the world, according to the app's support service Passport, the premier parking and transit mobile payment platform.

"Our goal at Passport is to help our clients take the stress and inefficiency out of parking and transit through our innovative payment platform," Passport CEO Bob Youakim said in a statement. "We're proud to serve and partner with the City of Portland to introduce this new service to their community and create a customized and seamless parking experience."

PBOT launched Parking Kitty in partnership with Portland State University and Portland Parks & Recreation, which had already been using another Passport parking app at Washington Park, according to Parks & Recreation Director Mike Abbaté.

"With this new app," Abbaté said in a statement, "visitors can park and enjoy all the world-class attractions of Washington Park without running back to the meter to add more time."

Simply downloading the app is the first step. From there, look for Parking Kitty signs at any one of the 15,000 parking locations where the app will be usable, set the time you'll need to park, and voila. Parking times can be extended remotely through the app to the maximum time allowed at the respective parking space. Users can also set notifications (which alert with a 'meow' sound) to be reminded of upcoming expirations.

"We want it to be easy to pay for parking in Portland. We also want it to be fun. Parking Kitty helps us do both. As a mobile app, it makes it convenient for Portlanders and visitors to pay for parking. We chose the name to reflect some of our city's creativity and hopefully bring a smile to Portland's drivers," PBOT Director Leah Treat said in a statement. "We want it to be simple and efficient to find and pay for parking because well-managed on-street parking is good for drivers, good for business and good for our transportation system."

Parking fees will stay more or less the same but with the addition of a 10-cent fee for using Parking Kitty:

• $2 per hour in the Downtown District;
• $1 per hour in the Lloyd District;
• $1.20 per hour in the Central East Side District;
• $1.60 per hour in the Marquam Hill and Northwest districts; and
• $5 flat rate for the Flanders Lot.

The app is available now at Google Play and the App Store for Android and Apple devices. It's also online at https://parkingkitty.ppprk.com/park.

Image via Portland Bureau of Transportation