Say you’ve parked your car in a two hour parking zone while you go off to lunch. After lunch you decide to pop into the nearby bookstore and you lose track of time… and by the time you get back to your car there’s a ticket under the windshield wipers.
There are plenty of ways to avoid getting that ticket. You could make a mental note of the time you park and make sure to get back to your car on time. You could start a stopwatch on your phone. Or you could use Double Parked — a simple and free Android app that plays a ringtone to let you know when your time is up.
I like the basic concept.You just fire up the Double Parked app and scroll through the list of parking signs to select 2 hour parking, 1 hour, 90 minutes or less. The lowest increment is just 5 minutes.
There are a few problems though. The highest number is 2 hours — so if you’re in a 3 or 4 hour zone, the app doesn’t work. And the app doesn’t ring 10 minutes before your time is up. It rings when your time is up — which means that your time has already expired by the time Double Parked lets you know that it’s time to move the car.
Still, while the app doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do with a simple stopwatch app, Double Parked has a simple interface that makes the process of setting a timed alarm much simpler. If you frequently find yourself pulling up to parking meters or to zones with parking time limits, it could certainly come in handy.
I would agree that having the timer go off the moment you get a ticket is useless. But my only hope is that since this is version 1.1 that the developer will allow me to adjust when the timer goes off. But I agree that the visual icons of the parking signs is more efficient that creating a countdown timer. Thanks for spotting this. You must live in Philadelphia.