Parking on Campus a Snap With Carleton Professor’s App
Ottawa Citizen (06/16/10) Pilieci, Vito

Carleton University professor Dwight Deugo has developed iParked.ca, a system that enables users to pay for parking at campus lots with a text message.

The system reads the text messages from drivers and catalogs the payment and license plate information. The system also sends text message notifications 10 minutes before the paid parking time has expired, enabling users to pay again without having to repay at a meter.

“This works on any phone, you don’t need an iPhone or something like it,” Deugo says. If the system proves effective in tests over the summer, the university may use it for all of its parking lots next year.

Deugo says the idea for the system came to him when he got caught in bad weather and had no way to pay for parking without getting wet. “I was trying to park in the pouring rain and I got fed up,” he says. “I just thought, ‘Why can’t we do this?'”