The city has adopted a system from Passport, a parking technology company, that offers a new way for it to track, reconcile and manage payments.
Boston’s previous parking solution was more than 40 years old and included siloed equipment that was not easily integrated into other city systems, said Amelia Capone, Boston’s director of parking and curbside management.
“To give a sense of how antiquated it was, when we began the transition, the incumbent provider sent a physical server to city offices so we could extract data manually,” Capone said via email.
The new system, adopted last month, checks many of the must-have boxes for public-sector technology systems today: it is cloud-based and designed to deliver more reliable, data-driven service.
“This upgrade is helping us better manage curbside space, improve compliance, and support safer, more efficient streets,” Capone said.
The Passport technology is managing some 3 million annual parking sessions across some 10,000 public parking spaces in Boston, where more than 1 million parking tickets are issued annually, Gene Rohrwasser, the company’s chief technology officer, said.
City parking departments are no different than other areas of city services. They are being asked to operate under tighter budgets and higher expectations from residents, Khristian Gutierrez, Passport CEO and co-founder, said. These shifts are prompting the replacement of legacy systems — particularly in areas intersecting with finance — with new solutions grounded in transparency and automation.
“This modernization matters because payments infrastructure is foundational public-sector technology,” Gutierrez said via email. “Municipalities face growing pressure to replace outdated, siloed systems with scalable, integrated solutions that improve efficiency and accountability.”
Technology designed to improve parking compliance and payments is often the first step in modern digital curb management, experts said, setting up a foundation on which to build new transportation and parking concepts.
“Without a strong backbone for compliance, the curb becomes chaotic — rules turn into suggestions, cities lose revenue, congestion increases, and they lack the real-time data needed to make smart decisions,” Gutierrez said. “Once that foundation is in place, everything that accesses the curb can and should be managed and monetized.”
Parking officials in Boston look forward to days when enforcement and compliance with parking regulation are easier for city officials and for the motorists using the spaces.
“By connecting parking, permitting, payment processing, and enforcement in one cloud-based platform, our staff now has access to real-time information that helps ensure rules are applied fairly and consistently across the city,” Capone said.
The Passport Payments platform migrates large caches of data “into one place,” she said, enabling the department to capitalize on the opportunity to strategically plan how to improve parking in one of the country’s most congested cities.
“We now have the right data and tools in place to see what’s happening on our streets, spot trends, and adjust when needed,” Capone said. “We can review data on demand instead of having to request reports and wait for someone else to run them, like we did with our previous vendor.”
