City Parking is introducing a new Pre-Paid Parking Card and this will be available from the 16th of May 2018 (today, if you had not checked the dates). The card will be the same as an ordinary bank card in size and will parking in the CBD less of a chore.
How can you get your hands on the card
Approach the Parking Marshal/Offices and pay $10 for the card itself. Of this $10 dollars that you are parting ways with $5 dollars will be credited for parking. The card will allow you to pay for three tiers of parking: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour. This is great because as it stands they were not offering these time slots and you had to pay for one hour even if you wanted to just spend 10-15 mins in a place. We are not sure how much this 15-minute ticket will actually cost. We will update the article when we have that knowledge.
How does the card work?
You can reload the card with funds and the minimum amount you can load up is $1. Once you’ve gotten to a parking bay all you need to do is tap the parking agents device using your prepaid card. The machine will print out the receipt, you stick it on your car and you’re on way. Simple and efficient.
Hopefully, the cards won’t be scarce
A lot of other devices have been released in the past i.e Smart Park System-this came with a mobile device that was supposed to calculate the time spent parking and allocating the right parking fee- but this device didn’t catch on. Smart Park devices, though useful, were quite difficult to secure and because of this they never really took off. I guess the council didn’t market the devices well enough to get people interested in them on a large scale.
We’ll get to save precious minutes
Having to wait for a parking agent to attend to you is time-consuming and quite irritating. In addition, the steps you have to go through to make that transaction once the agent has attended you are not exactly exciting either. Fortunately, with this, you won’t have to go through any of that anymore.
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10 comments
$5 for a card wat a joke. Why cnt they use bank cards that r already there. Now u have several bankd offering mini pos machines like steward bank and cabs they shld tap into that rather than have customers card multiple cards and add more expenses on customer
Plus how will this work already they have two separate billing systems that are for the cbd area and the downtown area
There’s nothing those thieving ignoramuses can do to impress me at this point. That still doesn’t address the clamping issue that’s terrorising citizens on the streets of Harare. I no longer get into town unless I’m passing through or as an emergency. Harare City Parking SUCKS!
These criminals need to a serious audit of their entire system. TechZim should do an investigative piece on their parking system and all its irregularities. We the people demand it
What’s happens after an hour can they automatically credit cause of I’m far away…I have to go back just to get another ticket otherwise I’ll be clamped… True story
I want a solution were I dont have to look for the marshall paying via card and paying via ecocash to me they are the same, there is no convenience here.
I second that! It is frustrating getting clamped yet when you parked there is not a single marshall in sight, they expect you to go looking for them. Introduce a self service meter that will deduct & generate a ticket for you.
This is just daylight robbery, $5 for a swipe card. The cost of a swipe card is less than $2 and that’s when you are sourcing it via third party. Even Zinara temporarily scrapped the card fee after realising that most people in their sound mind didn’t want to part with money just for the card.
Besides that, you are being charged for parking that used to be free, and at exorbitant rates, then you champion them for innovation. You should be asking why, the 15 minute and 30 minute options aren’t available to cash payers. The excuse before was that their system couldn’t be configured for less than 1 hour parking duration, but evidently it can. Meaning that they have overcome this “technical obstacle”, simply as a marketing point for their card. Otherwise, they have been intentionally ripping us off all along.
They should just create an app similar to the one used by the marshals. Have it linked to ecocash and GPS location. Im one of the many motorists who has been fleeced hard earned money through their inefficient systems.
Who advises the City Council on IT? Will the Mayor himself pay Bond$5.00 for a swipe card, must be joking? Anyone did market research or things are just dreamt up by anyone and implemented without serious thought?
What happened to the free 30mins parking we used to get in the old days?