Meet The Company Disrupting The Way Stadiums Handle Parking

For the millions of Americans who attend sporting events and concerts at arenas across the country, the joy of public spectacle is usually marred pre-and-post show by the congestion of stadium parking.

Many of us have accepted the difficulty of stadium parking as a fact of life, but one startup is trying to streamline the way we park at public events.

StadiumPark, led by founder Jeremy Crane, has developed an app that allows spectators to pay for stadium parking quickly with a credit or debit card. The company works with events companies and stadiums to replace cash parking payments with the StadiumPark system.

Foregoing cash parking payments makes the parking process smoother for patrons and helps event organizers keep track of parking revenues more easily, Crane said in an interview with Benzinga.

“The user gets an expedited entry into the parking lot,” Crane told Benzinga. “Often, we’re setting up dedicated StadiumPark lanes. Our transactions are much faster than cash, so we can get people in quicker.”

The company recently had its first major implementation at Rabobank Arena in Bakersfield, California, through a deal Crane struck with AEG, the largest venue management company in the world.

“Many people arrived at the arena with the app downloaded and ready to use,” said Crane. “The parking attendants especially love the app, as it makes their jobs more efficient and they can tell how much easier it is for their customers.”

The format of paying for stadium parking needs a technological upgrade, said Crane. He says he didn’t come up with the idea by being frustrated about long parking lines at stadiums, but rather, from his experience working for a mobile parking payment startup focused on municipal parking meters in New York. He saw that there was an opportunity to give an industry a technological upgrade.

“We enhance the fan experience,” said Crane. “All these venues are trying to use technology to get people to the stadium and make it more fun for fans. Also, often, cash goes missing as a result of theft in the parking lot. As rates of StadiumPark use go higher, revenues also increase, as there’s less opportunity for cash theft.”

StadiumPark charges users a service fee of $0.99 to $2.49, depending on the price of parking.