Pay for Parking with Snapper

Wellington City Council has begun trialling Snapper cards and 2degrees Touch2Pay smartphones with Snapper Mobile to pay for car parking in the city. Some 50 pay-and-display machines around the Wakefield Street and Courtenay Place area can now take Snapper payments. The Council’s Transport Portfolio Leader, Andy Foster, says the intention is that city-wide Snapper Parking will be launched mid-June.

"Over the next six weeks we’ll fit 550 on-street parking terminals covering more than 3000 parking spaces in the CBD with Snapper terminals. This new system is a first for New Zealand and means paying for parking will become a lot easier for Wellingtonians."

The technology that enables the use of Snapper cards and Touch2Pay for parking was developed by New Zealand company Integrated Technology Solutions. Wellington is one of the first cities in the world to adopt the NFC (Near Field Communication) based technology on parking equipment. NFC is a short range wireless technology that allows the transfer of information between two devices, in this case a Snapper or a Touch2Pay smartphone with the Snapper Mobile app and the parking equipment.

"The motorists of Wellington will love using Snapper on the meters because the solution is built with the user in mind," says Mark Oliver, Technical Director of Integrated Technology Solutions. "They just hold their Snapper in front of the Snapper panel on the parking meter, there’s no need to insert the card into the machine.

"Having already won local and international design awards, as well as being voted the ‘World’s Easiest to Use Parking Terminal’, it was important that the solution looked good and was easy to use," says Oliver. "The terminal’s big graphical screen, which displays intuitive step-by-step instructions, makes the system easy to follow."

Snapper CEO Miki Szikszai says, "Snapper is built on a single idea – making every day easier. It doesn’t matter if you are taking the bus, buying a coffee, catching a taxi and now paying for your parking, Snapper is all about making those transactions instant and easy so you can just get on with your day.

With close to 250,000 customers in Wellington, adding Snapper to parking meters is the next step in providing our customers with even more places to pay and check their balance; and at 25 cents the transaction fee is better value compared to credit cards and text message parking."