App City: Apps to Ease Parking

The company, Pango, recently introduced a smartphone application to manage the parking process. After setting up an account, you can drop your car off with an attendant and keep track of what it is costing you on your phone. When it is time to get your car back, you can tell the garage up to an hour ahead of time so the attendant can retrieve it. Pango also talks with the garage’s computers, so users do not have to use cash or physical credit cards. Tipping still happens the old-fashioned way.

This is all very exciting, but it comes with one big caveat: you have to park in the Imperial parking garage on East 77th Street, just off Lexington Avenue. Pango plans to have two more garages up and running next month, and all of Imperial’s lots functional within a year. The company says it is pursuing partnerships with other garage companies as well.

For now, it is still working out the bugs. When Pango showed me the app the other day, it took almost an hour for the system to recognize that the car we were trying to retrieve was actually parked in the garage.

Pango built its business doing pay-by-phone street parking in Israel, and is in the process of setting up that service in several small cities in the United States. A competitor, Parkmobile, offers pay-by-phone street parking in several cities in the area.

Pango is also eyeing New York’s Muni-Meters, with some pretty ambitious plans. By collecting data about street parking in real time, the company says, it could do things like shift pricing in response to demand, or notify users when spots open up. “We don’t know your name, but we know three people left spaces on 77th Street,” said Roy Arad, Pango’s vice president of operations.

Or at least they will know. New York’s Transportation Department is not ready. The city put out a request for proposals for pay-by-phone parking in 2011 but let it expire without taking action.

Already, though, parking New Yorkers can get some use out of their smartphones. One powerful tool is Best Parking, which has been around in various forms for seven years. Its app’s interface is a map with information on about 1,300 garages in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. You enter where and when you want to park, and it shows rates, with discounts available with coupons it has negotiated. Redeem these coupons with a special code, and Best Parking gets a commission.

The app also offers information on street parking, with color-coded indicators for free, metered and no parking zones.

Keeping all this information up-to-date is a big task, said Ben Sann, a 24-year-old Manhattan native who founded Best Parking before he even had a car. Some information is provided by garages, and the company offers Starbucks gift cards to users who report incorrect information. The company also sends out an employee to pound the pavement four times a year.

How did Mr. Sann learn that parking was a local obsession? “Seinfeld.”

Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips by e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or by Twitter to @joshuabrustein.