Coins, Cards, or Apps: Impact of Payment Methods on Street Parking Occupancy and Search Times

City dwellers often struggle with on-street parking in many cities, where they generally need to pay for parking in advance. However, drivers usually cannot accurately foresee how much parking time they need. Compared to traditional payment methods, that is, cash and credit card through on-site meters, mobile payment applications provide more flexibility: drivers can adjust their parking sessions remotely if a longer stay is in need. Utilizing data from an online survey and high-resolution transaction records provided by a municipal agency in a densely populated North American city, we analyze how different payment methods and hourly parking prices affect drivers’ parking behavior, street parking occupancy, and search time to find an available parking spot. Our findings reveal that mobile payments facilitate shorter parking duration, which in turn improves the turnover rate of parking spaces and reduces the overall search time. Furthermore, we observe that a driver’s parking behavior is not solely determined by price or payment method but rather by the interaction of both factors, making it essential for any policy analysis to consider this interplay. In particular, mobile payers are more sensitive to price changes than credit card payers, whereas cash payers are identified as the most sensitive to price changes. To provide further guidance to municipalities, we simulate different pricing mechanisms and show that progressive pricing and mobile payment adoption, along with pricing strategies, significantly impact both search time and occupancy compared to constant pricing.