COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) -Increasingly, cashless parking is gaining popularity and convenience as people gravitate towards carrying web-connected phones over cash. Many parking facilities across the country now employ mobile apps or QR codes to collect payment, those black-and-white squares leading to a website that collects information for convenient payment.
One woman told KBTX her visit to Northgate this past weekend was anything but convenient after her car was towed over what she called a “glitch” with the QR code she scanned when parking.
ParkMobile is a mobile and web app for parking payments in North America, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Users can pay for on-street and off-street parking via the app, web browser, or phone call. They manage more than a dozen parking lots around Northgate, Texas A&M, and College Station.
Nadya Lopez says she scanned the ParkMobile QR code at the Coyote Lot on Patricia Street in Northgate and paid for what she thought was a parking spot for two hours.
When she got back to the lot after what she said was only 40 minutes, her car had been towed, and she had to travel to Bryan to get it.
At that point, she looked back at the receipt and discovered she’d been marked in a spot in St. Cloud, Minnesota. It’s her belief the data for the zone and parking spaces was transposed through a glitch during the scanning and payment process.
Lopez says she and her friend double-checked all the entries before checking out of the app. Lopez says she also noticed that options like using Apple Pay were not immediately available, which she says seemed odd.
“I had a friend with me and she even scanned it as well because it was also taking a minute on my end to load. Once we got everything to load, I put in all the information that…
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