Filip Brož I live in the Highlands, but I often go to the capital. Every time I visit Prague, I decide where to park my car. I most often use parking spaces in business and shopping centers. Through acquaintances, I also learned about several places in the housing estates near the center. However, what I avoid like hell are the zones that were expanded again last October. I admit that I am absolutely not familiar with them. I don't know what color it means, where I can find it, and I have no idea how long I can stand there, if at all.
When I arrive at a place where there is a zone and I can stand there for a while after paying the parking fee, another stumbling block comes. At the parking machine, I find that it only takes coins, which I don't always have with me.
At the end of last year, however, two Czech applications appeared in the App Store, which exactly solve the aforementioned problems with parking in Prague. It's about applications Parking in Prague a zaparkuju.cz. During my last visits to Prague, I tested both applications and I have to say that I'm keeping them both for now - they complement each other well.
All essential information in one place
As soon as you start the application, a map will appear in front of you and when you enter Prague, the street will be colored according to the available parking zones. In addition to zones, both applications also offer up-to-date information from P+R car parks, which are available online. IN zaparkuju.cz you can see the number of free places immediately in the pink indicator, v Parking in Prague you have to click on the given parking lot. During testing, I checked the data from the applications with the information on the light boards, and at least in Chodov and Holešovice, everything was correct.
It offers about specific P+R or classic parking lots Parking in Prague only basic information in the form of the mentioned vacancies and address. IN zaparkuju.cz you will find further information in detail, such as opening hours, parking prices, ratings or advantages of the location with regard to MDH or security.
As soon as you zoom in on a zone on the selected street on the map, you will get the necessary information about it. IN zaparkuju.cz you can either pay directly after the first click or open a detail of the entire street. In it, you can see the name of the zone, the street and the price, and you also have the colors marked (and explained below the map) which zones are available.
Parking in Prague similarly, it does not have a detailed preview, but the same information will be displayed in a box when you click on a given zone (either as a whole or specific zones of the ZTP type or prohibited). You can see the current and the next tariff, which can be free, for example. In the next update Parking in Prague it should be possible to display only zones that are currently free.
There is one difference - and a rather fundamental one - between the applications. It's about navigation. While in zaparkuju.cz you can start navigation to a specific parking space in your preferred third-party application (Apple or Google Maps or Waze), Parking in Prague it can only navigate to large parking lots, but mainly it doesn't allow you to easily switch to some third-party application and it only shows you the route from your position to the parking lot in a not very effective way.
Developers zaparkuju.cz then they want to improve their application with another function in the future. The possibility of booking free parking spaces is coming - although the button for booking can already be seen in the application, it does not work yet. For cross-country or commuter drivers, for example, this can be a very useful feature.
Old and new zones
Now we come to a very important activity related to parking in Prague - payment. There are at least two types of parking machines in Prague: older ones that only accept coins, and newer ones that even accept payment by card or even online. In the first case, there are often problems with the fact that you simply do not have any change with you, which is not always easy to solve.
Developers zaparkuju.cz this is probably also why they decided not to include these "outdated zones" where newer machines have not yet been installed, arguing that the newer and older types together would only confuse users, because somewhere they would not be able to pay online directly in the app. In the app Parking in Prague on the other hand, you will find all parking zones, which is clearly a better option. Sometimes you simply need to park in an area where there are no new machines at all, and if you only followed the app zaparkuju.cz, so you might think that there are no parking spaces either.
The difference in coverage is perfectly demonstrated, for example, by the situation on both banks of the Vltava between Charles Bridge and Tančící dom. While in Parking in Prague you have colored most of the streets, in zaparkuju.cz you will find zones only in Smíchov, where there are already new machines. Option to turn on v zaparkuju.cz old zones at least manually would certainly be appropriate. In comparison, you may also notice that while Parking in Prague uses map data from Apple, zaparkuju.cz bets on the open-source Mapbox.
Awkward checkout experience
And now to the payment itself. This is designed in more or less the same way in both applications, because for now, unfortunately, it is only possible to use the so-called "virtual parking clock", which is a web application, to pay for parking. IN zaparkuju.cz can be paid automatically in each zone (see reason above), v Parking in Prague you will see the VPH (virtual parking clock) icon next to the zone detail if online payment is possible - in both applications, however, you are then transferred to the aforementioned web application, which provides a somewhat outdated and slow experience on iPhones.
As a result, it is important that you can save your number plate (or more if you need) and your payment/CCS cards in both applications, so that the purchase is as easy as possible even through the web interface. If you allow yourself to be transferred to the virtual parking meter directly from the selected zone, its code is automatically filled in, so you only need to enter the security password that you set for each card.
You can then view the payment "slip" directly in the application (but it cannot be downloaded in any way, at most take a screenshot) or download it in the e-mail you receive. Due to the current design of the online machine, it is probably not even possible for applications to continue working with a specific "ticket" and possibly save it.
What offers Parking in Prague in addition, there are parking meters. With the "Park where I'm standing" button (you can also select the zone manually) you will automatically save the place where you are parked, and you can also start a countdown for how long you can stand there. The application then notifies you 20 and 10 minutes before the limit expires and also when you have lost your parking space.
As for the payment portal, zaparkuju.cz is planning a major improvement. The current solution is certainly not ideal, so the developers are preparing their own payment portal, which should appear in the next version together with the possibility of booking. As a result, the whole process should really take a few seconds and be the way we imagine it on mobile devices today, because it will be integrated directly into the application. But we don't know the details yet.
As we found out in our own testing, there is no clear winner between two applications targeting the same problem. Paradoxically, they complement each other quite well when zaparkuju.cz offers easy navigation to the parking lot via any third-party app and Parking in Prague in turn, it has a complete database of parking spaces. But these are definitely very useful helpers, whether you park in Prague every day (at least it's easier to pay online) or you're arriving as a commuter and looking for the best place to park.
[appbox app store 1180604196]
[appbox app store 1185062506]
The application for paying for parking via SMS as on Android in large cities throughout the country nowhere :-(
I'm not surprised, every city uses a different system and it would be quite expensive to maintain, so if they put it on the AppStore for a certain amount, no one would buy it and people would just be scolded…
If you are coming from Vysočina, then you just need to park anywhere in the housing estate near metro station C or B.
You don't need to know any Praguers for that, just spend a few minutes studying the botka cz map, when you pick out suitable locations, then you'll start driving by memory.
It could be faster to park in Kolín at OC Futurum and you are in the center of Prague by express train in 40 minutes.
It must take longer from the outskirts of Prague by metro, including the journey from Cologne to Prague.