By Colleen Schonfield

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At Grand Valley State University, each academic year brings new opportunities and standards to ensure the accommodation of student population growth can be met through efforts of decongestion. As campus traffic picks back up and continues to increase, new parking implementations have been introduced to both the Allendale and Pew campuses to ease the strains of traveling and make commuting simpler.

As of this month, the launch of a new parking payment service called Parkmobile will be featured in housing and academic parking lots to aid commuters. This is a pay-by-cell service that enables students, faculty, staff or visitors to pay for parking via a smart phone app, toll free number or the web.

Select pay-by-cell parking meters will be denoted by a green Parkmobile sticker which will provide directions on setting up a payment account through PayPal or credit card. After an account is set-up, parking becomes as simple as keying in the meter’s zone number which will activate the parking session.

To ensure the avoidance of a parking citation, the zone number matches with the license plate and cell phone number verified through Parkmobile.

According to the Grand Valley Police Department, the academic meter hourly rate through Parkmobile is set at $1.50 or 30 cents per 15 minutes at a maximum of four hours. The housing meter rate is 25 cents per 15 minutes at a maximum of 30 minutes.

Worried about how much time is left before racking up that 10th parking ticket? Not a problem, as Parkmobile provides an option to send a text message 15 minutes before the expiration of the parking transaction in which you can add more time or walk to your car before the GVSU parking enforcement staff gets there first.

Parking restrictions are continually enforced through the GVPD, so it is important to remember that Parkmobile is a payment service that abides by GVSU’s parking standards and does not exempt anyone from parking citations or disobeying campus parking rules.

According to the GVPD website, Parkmobile is not associated with parking lot enforcements, does not issue refunds and does not accept or process citation appeals.

At this time Parkmobile stickers can be found on the meters in the Kirkhof parking lot and will continue to expand to other parking meters throughout campus as the month progresses.

More information on the rules and regulations of Parkmobile can be found on their website at http://www.gvsu.edu/gvpd/parkmobile-pay-by-cell-faq-s-132.htm.