HELSINKI, Finland—The City of Helsinki has commercially implemented a mobile-phone parking payment system. A Sonera Corp. subsidiary, Payway Oy, signed a cooperation agreement to offer the Parkit parking payment service until the end of 2003.
The service can be used in nearly all the more than 18,000 parking places on the Helsinki peninsula. The service can also be used in short- and long-term car parks at the Port of Helsinki, in a parking area near the Helsinki Central Railway Station and the short-term parking of the Helsinki-Vantaa airport.
The service currently has more than 1,600 users, about 400 of which are in Helsinki and the remainder in Stockholm, Gavle and Sundsvall, Sweden.
The system transmits about 7,000 parking payment transactions monthly. Payway has targeted to have 15,000 users before the end of the year.
To start the service after parking, a driver calls the Parkit phone number allocated for the parking zone in question. When leaving, the driver calls the nationwide end-parking number. The system calculates the amount of the parking fee on the basis of the parking time used. The parking is invoiced either on a user’s mobile-phone bill or a separate bill.
“The method used by our traffic wardens in their daily parking control routines is also mobile-phone-based, and it appears to be very reliable,” said Jouko Koski, head of municipal parking control for the City of Helsinki.
