New Paper in Journal of Urban Technology - Who Really Benefits When You Pay for Parking on Your Phone?
We’re excited to share that our paper “Power and Ethical Concerns in the Integration of Smart City Technologies: A Case Study of Parking Payment Applications in Israel” has been published in the Journal of Urban Technology.
The paper, co-authored by Jonathan Dortheimer and Gilad Chalfon, started from a simple, testable assumption: if a mobile app makes it easier to pay for parking, fewer people should end up with unpaid-parking fines. That was the pitch made by the parking-app industry itself, and it’s an intuitive one. So we went looking for the data to confirm it.
The twist: it didn’t hold up. Analyzing years of municipal revenue and violation records from Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva, Herzliya, and Acre (obtained through Israel’s Freedom of Information Law — most municipalities we approached couldn’t or wouldn’t provide the data at all), we found parking-app revenue climbing by double digits nearly everywhere, but not accompanied by the expected drop in violations. If anything, in most cities the two rose together, a positive correlation exactly opposite to what industry claims predicted. A survey of 278 app users reinforced the picture: despite near-universal adoption of apps like Pango and CelloPark, nearly a third of respondents had still been fined — often for reasons baked into the apps’ own design, like forgetting to reactivate a payment after a time limit.
That gap between what the technology promised and what it delivered led us to a bigger question: who actually benefits from “smart” public services run by private companies?
Following the money — and the power. Digging into the apps’ business practices, terms of service, and legal history, we found a duopoly (Pango and CelloPark, with Pango dominant at roughly 86% of municipal billing) that has become de facto public infrastructure — hard for cities or residents to opt out of, and increasingly hard to regulate. Using an established taxonomy of “dark patterns” in interface design, we catalogued a set of manipulative tactics baked into these apps:
- Marketing premium “fine protection” subscriptions by leaning on the anxiety of government penalties — literally selling insurance against the state’s own punitive power
- Sales calls timed to slip users into paid trials they forget to cancel
- Per-car pricing that quietly multiplies charges without warning
- Blaming users for fines caused by app design flaws, then upselling a fix
- Interfaces that make subscribing one tap away and canceling a multi-step ordeal
- Continuing to bill users even after they’ve uninstalled the app
Why it matters beyond parking. The paper situates this case within the broader “platformization” of cities — the same dynamics that let ride-hailing and short-term rental platforms outgrow the regulators meant to oversee them. When a government outsources a public service to a private app, it can quietly lose control over both the infrastructure and the data, while retaining the blunt instrument — fines — that the private company can then leverage for its own revenue. The paper argues this isn’t a uniquely Israeli story, and calls for stronger regulatory oversight wherever cities hand public services to unaccountable private software.
Read the full paper in the Journal of Urban Technology.