Getting a parking ticket in San Francisco is a hassle, but paying for it just got easier.
The City and County of San Francisco launched a new Web-based service late last week that lets people pay their parking tickets over the Internet with a major credit card. The city issues some 2.4 million parking citations per year and already processes between 700 and 800 payments per day with its pay-by-phone service.
The online payments service can be found at CityServices – the official eCommerce website for the City and County of San Francisco.
Site organizers say a typical online payment takes less than five minutes to complete. With just the citation number from the parking ticket, you can pay with your Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express charges are accepted through the site’s secure payment engine. While there, you can also print a hard copy receipt and check the payment status of other City-issued parking citations.
Both online and pay-by-phone payments include a $2.75 transaction fee to cover the cost of electronic processing. Of course you can still pay parking violations the old-fashioned way – by mail or in person – but, Hey, this is the techno center of the universe after all.
“This new program demonstrates this Department’s ongoing commitment to provide a high level of customer service to San Francisco residents,” said Fred Hamdun, Executive Director for the Department of Parking & Traffic. “This service also provides greater convenience to the more than four million people who visit San Francisco annually, allowing them quick access to our payment service.”
Hamdun says the new service is only available for parking tickets and is not yet available for any other traffic or vehicular violation, however the city is planning to start selling residential parking permits at the site.
CityServices also offers a variety of convenient online government services for San Franciscans including online property tax payments, a suite of building inspection permits, and birth and death certificate requests. The site was developed and mostly managed by Bay Area Interactive, a subsidiary of eGovernment firm NIC in collaboration with the City and County of San Francisco.