Oklahoma City Approves Contract to Deploy Mobile Parking App In Partnership with Flowbird

Oklahoma City Council approved a contract on Tuesday, January 7th, to implement a mobile phone parking app in partnership with Flowbird, a leading supplier of urban mobility solutions. The smart mobile parking solution will bring ultimate convenience to motorists, allowing users to pay for parking with their iPhone or Android devices.

Flowbird’s app platform has over 2.5 million users worldwide, and offers an easy, fast and secure option to make mobile parking payments. Once the app is downloaded to a user’s mobile device, a quick registration process walks them through their profile and payment set up. When ready to park, users simply select their parking location from the GPS enabled map, choose a duration and confirm payment. A notification will be sent to the user when the parking session is about to expire with an option to extend right from their phone. Payment methods can be securely stored for quick and easy parking transactions in the future.

The app is being customized for the City with EMBARK, the city’s transportation agency.

“Having an app will make it even easier to pay for on-street parking in Oklahoma City, especially for people who use downtown parking regularly,” said EMBARK Administrator Jason Ferbrache, “Convenience is key for parking, and we’re glad to make it more convenient than ever when you’re downtown.”

Flowbird’s app features more than just mobile payment capabilities. The multi-function platform offers advancements in technology such as:

• ‘Find my Car’ – Walking directions back to the user’s parked car’s location
• Off-Street Parking Reservations – Allows motorists to pre-pay for parking based on location or based on a specific event
• Validation codes - A function that allows the City or local merchants to distribute validation codes to app users so they don’t have to pay for parking
• Bookmark - Saves the user’s favorite parking locations

Oklahoma City has been a partner of Flowbird since July of 2012 when they began implementation of 175 Flowbird multi-space pay stations in place of single, coin-operated meters. The digital upgrade eight years ago gave drivers the option to pay with credit or debit cards rather than coin only. The importance of customer convenience then, holds true to the City’s values today, as they add a new era of digital upgrade in the form of mobile app payment, joining neighboring Flowbird App customers, Norman, OK, and University of Oklahoma.

The mobile app will be integrated with the parking rights system and back-end reporting system of the Flowbird Pay by Plate pay stations, providing the City’s parking administrators a unified parking payment solution. All transactions from the mobile app and the pay stations will be available in real-time to the City’s parking enforcement system.

“We are very appreciative that Oklahoma City has put its trust in Flowbird to deliver their new mobile parking payment application,” said Benoit Reliquet, President of Flowbird North America, “The City continues to grow and we are proud to be part of its overall transportation solution.”

About Flowbird 

Flowbird is the world’s leading parking services and urban mobility company.

The name Flowbird expresses the innate ability of birds to navigate individually within crowded spaces; mirroring the benefits for people of the intelligent parking and multi-modal systems developed for towns and cities by Parkeon and Cale.

Flowbird’s group resources include 500 R&D engineers working on behalf of customers to push the boundaries of innovation in transportation hardware, software, sensor systems, machine learning and AI, information security and mobile development.