MPLS Parking 4+

This is Minneapolis. It snows. It rains. It gets very cold. Who wants to walk down to the street-side payment machine (if you can find it) and stand in the rain or snow or cold while navigating a menu with your gloves on? Or, worse yet, wait until the person in front of you at the payment machine figures out how to use it? This easy-to-use app lets me just pull into a parking space, stay in my warm & dry car, bring up the app, enter the space number and length of time I want to park there, and start it. What could be easier? And if I run over the scheduled time period, it texts me a warning and I can extend the period right from the app - wherever I am. No need to go back to the car. If I forgot where I parked, it even shows me on a map! If a 25 cent transaction fee scares you away, don’t bother with the app. But it’s a trivial charge to save time and stay warm and dry for me.

I’ve tried many times to log in, with the correct account information, and I either am told it’s incorrect or, I’m still let in for maybe 2-3 minutes only to then be kicked out again (and told it’s the wrong information). I’m not sure how I could have the wrong log in information if, when I do get let in, I see my license plate number and all of my forms of payments I’d previously entered.

What’s most frustrating is, I’d love to send the developers a message and communicate with them directly but I can’t even stay in the app long enough to do that. And I send a request to reset my password, just in case that was the issue (even though, again, I’d managed to briefly get in more than once) and I’m still waiting almost a week later for the reset email (actually 2 emails were requested).

I’m curious what’s the point of the $0.25 fee for using the app each time you pay for parking. Is it not supposedly for helping maintain it and improve issues that get reported? Maybe I’m wrong but either way, this app could use marked improvements and it’s really disappointing that there’s no one to even try to communicate with about it because there are some people who may really need/benefit from the app over finding a pay station (which the last pay station was comically broken in additional to the app 👍).

I was trying to reserve future parking for a football game at US Bank stadium since I don’t go downtown often and find the parking situation very stressful. I found a ramp and quickly reserved a spot. I didn’t realize it defaults to the current time which I was obviously NOT downtown yet. I quickly (like within 1 minute) called their customer service line to have them cancel the reservation so I could revise the time to later. The woman on the phone said sure that she would submit the request for refund and then sent me a link to track my request. I have heard NOTHING from them yet and that was over 3 weeks ago. I’ve commented within the request tracker several times and emailed them. Still no response. In the meantime, the charge continues to appear on my credit card statement and it is NOT a small charge given it was event parking at US Bank Stadium. I’m guessing they just collect on people errors and then ignore any requests for cancelations. Very disappointed with the response and lack of service especially since I tried taking care of the issue with 1 minute of making the mistake.