Park (occasionally) By Phone
I want to like the Park By Phone service at Wrightsville Beach. I’ve rhapsodized about it before, and it’s so convenient when it works:
You register your cell phone with the service and can then dial an 800 number, enter your the slot where you’re parked and the number of hours. You can even refresh your time from the beach, or away from the car. It’d be *great* for downtown. It keeps you from having to lug quarters and is just a neat idea. It’s “M-commerce”!
But lately it hasn’t seemed to work except maybe on Stone Street, the main east-west drag there. The robot on the telephone says he can’t complete the transaction, or there’s been an error, or that number was not understood. I called support and they weren’t very helpful. Too bad.
I need to nudge my star-rating up a little. When it works it really works; I know at least one other location that’s live.
We went to the “L-shaped parking lot” beach this weekend, near Shell Island, which by coincidence was touted by the Star News as a particularly kid-friendly beach — and as a result was jam-packed with weekenders in water-wings, even in the early-ish A.M. when we arrived.
Instead of waiting in a long, harried line in front of the credit card parking machine, I bee-boo-boo-beeped into my cell phone and made my way to the beach.