Earlier this month you may have started noticing downtown Auburn's parking meters and kiosks were harder to find… and had been replaced by the Pango pay-by-phone system. (A few kiosks will stay in the core, and their vouchers still work at any on-street spot or city lot — but the default going forward is your phone.)
Basically, you download the Pango app, scan a QR code, or call a toll-free number. Rates are $2 an hour during enforcement, nights and weekends free.
I've been using Pango since I moved to Auburn in 2019. An app just made more sense to me than looking for a kiosk. But I know that comes from my comfort with technology. I actually spend a minimum of $15 on parking a month to spend time downtown.
Screenshot of my Pango App. On the right you see “$19 Spent this Month with $9.51 Wallet Amount” under it.
A system that assumes everyone downtown is carrying a smartphone and is comfortable tapping through an app or scanning a QR code quietly writes some people out of the picture. Plenty of our community folks — a lot of them older — carry a flip phone, or no cell at all, and "just call the toll-free number" is a real ask when you're standing on Genesee Street trying to punch a credit card into an automated menu in the cold. For those neighbors, the practical effect isn't inconvenience. It's not being able to park downtown at all.
Sue Waby, who's owned Regenerations on Genesee Street for nine years, laid this out in a letter to the editor recently, and it stuck with me. She hears it daily from customers — people who've started avoiding downtown altogether because the parking has become one more thing to figure out. Every one of those is a person not walking into her shop, or the coffee place, or the theater. When you make the front door harder to open, fewer people come through it, and a downtown lives or dies on how many people come through the door.
