Finding street parking in San Francisco and New York is a nightmare. Then when you find the holy grail of parking spaces you need to pay by the minute. But you never know how long you need so you either put in too much money or not enough. But what if there were a way to only pay what we needed without risking coming back to a ticket on our windshields?

At PagerDuty, we’ve learned that people use Pagerduty to get alerted from all sorts of things. Our friends at Sumo Logic have even used us to alert them when their office AC unit filled with water. So after a few team members were complaining about tickets outside our San Francisco office we proposed a mutually beneficial solution to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Our program will reward proactive drivers while allowing the SFMTA to generate revenue from expired parking spaces.

Starting June 1, 2014, a small pilot program will launch in SOMA before expanding to the rest of the San Francisco and then New York in the fall. You will be able to sync your smartphone with your parking meter to receive alerts via voice, SMS, email or push notification, 10, 5 or 1 minutes before your time runs out.  Once you acknowledge, you will have the ability to add time to your meter directly from your phone. In addition, SFMTA agreed to provide 2 minutes of leniency for the first acknowledgement.

To generate revenue, SFTMA will be able to virtually ticket your vehicle by sending tickets directly to your smart phone once your time has expired without having to without having to visit your vehicle by integrating their ticketing system with our technology. Effectively automating their process.

We encourage everyone to download the new ParkingDuty app, which will be available for iOS and Android May 25, 2014 to prepare for the June 1, 2014 pilot launch. Anyone parking not using the app will not be able to add time via their mobile device. In these cases, SFTMA will receive alerts immediately when a parking meter’s time runs out using a small mounted camera that will snap a photo when an alert triggers to mail tickets via your vehicle’s registered location.

Next time you park on the street in San Francisco or New York, just look for the PagerDuty logo on your meter. By the way, Happy April Fools. Get pranking.