Paid Parking In Austin Is Easier To Deal With Thanks To Google Maps

Google Maps just made dealing with paid parking a lot easier. At least for residents of Austin, Texas.

Starting today Google is rolling out a feature to Google Maps that lets you pay for your parking inside of the app. So instead of tracking down that meter machine, you can have everything ready to go beforehand.

The new paid parking Google Maps feature is a collaboration between Google and Passport. The collaboration was announced this morning via Passport’s official blog.

Paid parking in Google Maps only “begins” with Austin, but it won’t stop there

It isn’t uncommon for Google to pilot features in its apps in a single city and slowly expand. And that’s essentially what it’s doing here.

In working with Passport, which is a transportation software company, Google will start to roll out the feature to users today. Once the rollout begins, most or all users in Austin should have access over the coming weeks. Google and Passport are also planning to launch the feature in other cities across the country.

There’s no specific timeline for a full rollout within the city. And Google may not commit to rolling out in more cities until Austin is either completed or nearly completed.

Still, users in other locations should look forward to having this feature become available. Though Google and Passport haven’t mentioned where it will expand to next, Passport already works with numerous cities in some capacity, including Los Angles, Miami, Chicago, London, and Toronto just to name a few.

That doesn’t mean any of those cities will be next on the list. But it doesn’t mean they won’t be candidates either. Since Passport already seems to have a foothold in those locations.

Pay for parking when you get close to your destination

Aside from Google Maps and Passport technologies, the actual payment is powered by Google Pay.

So to use this you will need to have that set up. How it works is once you get close to your destination, you’ll be given the option to use Google Pay to pay for parking.

Obviously this feature isn’t going to be something that users are required to do. It’ll only be an option that they can choose to utilize or not utilize, so it’s totally user opt-in.

In addition to paying from inside the Google Maps app, it can also be done from the browser. Simply open up Chrome or whatever browser you use on your smartphone and navigate to pay.google.com/parking and you can pay directly from there as well.

This feature is rolling out to Google Maps applications on both Android and iOS devices.