Skip to main content

Ottawa’s parking spaces get NFC option

PayByPhone, an international provider of systems for parking and urban mobility payments, has announced Ottawa as the latest major North American city to implement its popular cell phone payment method for parking. PayByPhone parking allows drivers to pay for and extend their parking time using a mobile app, online, or calling a local phone number. Ottawa is the first Canadian city to incorporate near field communication (NFC) and QR code features for its parking payments.
April 30, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
5350 PayByPhone, an international provider of systems for parking and urban mobility payments, has announced Ottawa as the latest major North American city to implement its popular cell phone payment method for parking. PayByPhone parking allows drivers to pay for and extend their parking time using a mobile app, online, or calling a local phone number. Ottawa is the first Canadian city to incorporate near field communication (NFC) and QR code features for its parking payments.

“We’re pleased to be the first Canadian city to offer a NFC option to PayByPhone users,” said Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson. “The City of Ottawa is always looking at ways to provide better service to our residents, and PayByPhone is another way we’re doing that.”

Every Pay & Display machine in Ottawa has a PayByPhone sticker with instructions on how use the system. Embedded in that sticker is an NFC tag with the location number of the Pay & Display machine. Once signed up, customers who have an NFC compatible smartphone simply wave it over the logo on the sticker and the PayByPhone app or mobile web page is launched. The system recognises the user, identifies the parking location, and the customer enters the amount of time desired. An optional text message is sent five minutes before the parking session ends, and if needed, allows additional time to be purchased via the phone.

Drivers without NFC capable phones can still use the service by manually launching the app or simply calling the local number. The signs also contain QR codes for a mobile web transaction.

Related Content

  • July 3, 2015
    Geneva rolls out PayByPhone across the city
    Geneva has become the latest major city to roll out cashless mobile parking payments city-wide. The mobile payment service from parking payments systems supplier, PayByPhone, is now available in all spaces across the city. Drivers can pay for parking via the PayByPhone smartphone app. The deployment of PayByPhone across Geneva follows a successful year and a half pilot trial that saw the technology used in 500 spaces across the city. After positive feedback from drivers, Fondation des Parkings, the compa
  • July 30, 2013
    Geotoll’s payment app could be the smart answer to tolling interoperability
    Jon Masters looks at a smartphone app which could be the ‘disruptive technology’ that eases the way to interoperability in tolling systems. Consumer demand may soon drive the biggest step change yet in tolling. In the United States a new start-up company, Geotoll, has launched a smartphone app for electronic toll payment. It is not beyond possibility that rapid growth of the market for smartphones will continue – an estimated 50% of US citizens and 80% of Europeans now have one – and that the Geotoll brand
  • June 9, 2016
    Inrix expands in-car parking services with PayByPhone partnership
    Inrix is to integrate on-street parking data provided by Canadian company PayByPhone into its end-to-end parking solution for the connected car. According to Inrix, the partnership strengthens the prediction capabilities of its On-Street Parking by adding historical and real-time parking transaction information. It also adds significant coverage to the company’s in-car payment solution in North America and Europe. Inrix launched its dynamic off-street parking service in 2013, and introduced an integra
  • May 18, 2012
    NFC-enabled parking payment solution for Oakland
    Parkmobile USA has implemented a new mobile parking payment service in Oakland, California, that enables customers to pay for parking with their cell phone using the company's native mobile applications for iPhone, Android, Windows 7, and Blackberry smartphones anywhere in the city, but they can also choose to pay with NFC-enabled mobile phones by waving or tapping their phone on any of Parkmobile's NFC-enabled stickers.