Vancouver has approved a new mobile parking app for the city’s parking lots and metered spots, granting a new contract to New Brunswick-based HotSpot Parking app.
The approval was made last week by Vancouver City Council, according to DailyHive, an initial five-year contract worth $6.1 million, with room to expand to $12.2 million if the full 10-year contract is approved in the future. The bidding process to get a new parking app started back in late 2023.
The HotSpot Parking, Transit, and Taxi mobile app makes paying for parking, transit, and taxis from your smartphone much easier. The company’s app was picked over other bids from the likes of PayByPhone, ParkMobile and Honk Mobile, to name a few.
With HotSpot Parking, users can pay for and top-up parking sessions, receive alerts before sessions expire, and get refunds for unused time. The app allows payment for parking tickets, provides real-time parking maps, and supports merchant-validated free or subsidized parking.
The addition of HotSpot Parking adds yet another mobile parking app to the phones of Vancouverites, as different lots use different parking services.
HotSpot Parking currently serves other cities in Metro Vancouver such as Surrey, along with numerous other cities across Canada.
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This is such a disappointing decision made by the City of Vancouver, and what makes it worse is that most Vancouver citizens don't realize that it will actually hurt the city's own residents. Not just from the inconvenience of having to download, setup a d get used to yet another payment app. But the company PayByPhone is headquartered in downtown Vancouver. The app is made and maintained by people who live and work in Vancouver and who pay taxes to the City of Vancouver. This decision will economically hurt our own residents and neighbours — fellow Vancouverites. I know that government procurement is often predicated on the concept of lowest bidder wins the bid. But ease of use/quality has to factor into it (I don’t know anyone that would say that ZipBy or HangTag are easier to use or higher quality apps compared to PayByPhone). There also has to be a place for the consideration of patronizing your own businesses in RFP decision making process. The fact that EasyPark, which is wholly owned by the City of Vancouver, for years after they moved to a non-exclusive payment app model, has chosen to accept payments at the majority of their lots from half a dozen parking payment companies, but has steadfastly refused to allow PayByPhone to also participate was disgusting enough, but now to see the City choose to hurt its own residents and a major economic contributor to the City's employment and business community is just so very disgraceful. Patronize your own residents and neighbours before you send money out of the city and out of the province (or country in the case of some companies that EasyPark works with). Do better for your own resident and business community, City of Vancouver.
Wow, thank you for providing all of this context. I like the PayByPhone system and always felt their app was top notch and already works quite well. Ken Sim is such a corporate stooge. He wants to name our city parks after corporations and sell our future out from under us. Disgusting.
Damn you had alot to say!
Damn, you actually read a comment written by someone with the writing skill of a 5th grader.
Oh I didnt read it lmao
FFS! Have you looked at the Hotspot app? You have to create an account before you use it. In creating the account you have to indicate where you’re from. And you can only be from one of the cities in their pull-down menu – of which Surrey is the only municipality in Metro Vancouver listed. You can’t pay for the parking with a charge to your credit card, instead, you have to load your Hotspot wallet for a minimum non-refundable $10 so that they can borrow your money for free. Oh, and you can’t use Apple or Google Pay to top up your wallet so you have to store your credit card info on their janky site. Oh, immediately after I created my account I received a spam email from an unrelated merchant, Topaz Labs, (I know it was passed on by Hotspot because it was sent to the unique one-time email address I used to create the account). And no, there was no mention of permitting my email to be used for third party marketing purposes.
Every app that is on iOS or Androd should suppoer Apple Pay and Google Pay. Vancouver and other cities should make that a requirement for a parking app.
Google Pay/Google Wallet is a nightmare. No option to enter require PIN when approaching a PIN. At least not in the Android devices I used.
Wow. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea that app was this bad. This makes the decision by the City even worse. Requiring users to make a non-refundable deposit on a private wallet, forcibly give private information to an 3rd party and then not even mandate that the company protect user privacy runs completely counter to what any government should be doing. They should be mandating the privacy and protection of their citizens. Instead they choose to allow their chosen vendor to sell our data. Disgraceful. The Mayor and Council have a responsibility to their citizens, yes, but the city staffers who agreed to this contract should also be questioned as to how are they protecting their own citizens’ data.
City of Vancouver doesn't own most parking spots as the blogger implies. The exceptions are parks like Stanley Park and Queen Elizabeth Park,.
When visiting Vancouver. there are too many apps or options at a given parking spot and most of the apps are less than reliable or user friendly. Some don't even work as supported by the reviews in their respective app stores. Besides,there's the extra cost of using the app and Easy Park, one of the largest and most common in Metro Vancouver especially in the touristy downtown core doesn't have a functioning app.
Parking by phone was rarely ever used and ditching it is a good idea.