The Network Effect Comes to Parking

Last week in Milwaukee, between sessions and exhibits, IPMI attendees climbed onto open-air cruisers for a thirty-minute tour through the city. They moved through downtown streets, past restaurants and destinations, and at two points along the route, through parking garages where the gates opened without anyone stopping, reaching for a ticket, or touching a kiosk. The vehicles were pre-enrolled in Express Pay, and the experience was entirely the point — what it feels like to move through a city where parking simply gets out of the way, amplified by the network effect.

That feeling was the backdrop for the session Dan Roarty, Chief Digital Officer at Flash, and Andy Harman, VP of Global Product Sales at Arrive, brought to the IPMI stage — not a product walkthrough, but a thesis about where the parking industry stands, where it is going, and what the transformation already underway in cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia tells us about what comes next.

The Moment Every Industry Eventually Reaches

Industries do not transform gradually. They reach an inflection point where the right combination of experience, technology, and network density creates a shift that looks sudden from the outside but was years in the making. Dan opened the IPMI Speaker Session, The Network Effect: How Open Networks Transform Industries and Experiences, by tracing that pattern across the industries that have already crossed it.

Food delivery is the clearest case. In its early days, the experience was unreliable enough to barely justify itself. Orders routed to fax machines. Deliveries arrived late or wrong. The improvement over calling a restaurant directly was marginal at best. Then a new generation of companies changed the infrastructure underneath it. They took ownership of the delivery experience, built apps that made the process visible and trackable in real time, and opened their APIs so that orders could flow directly into restaurant point-of-sale systems. That last move was the one that mattered most. The moment delivery platforms connected openly to restaurant infrastructure, the friction that had been holding the category back dissolved. According to McKinsey, food delivery grew into a global market worth more than $150 billion, more than tripling in under a decade. The technology didn’t change consumer behavior on its own. The open network did.

Travel did the same thing. Retail followed. The pattern is consistent enough across industries to qualify as a blueprint: build an experience that is meaningfully better than the alternative, establish shared standards so systems can communicate at scale, and build a network open enough that operators, technology partners, and consumer platforms can all participate and create compounding value together.

Parking has not yet crossed that threshold, and that is exactly the opportunity Express Pay is built to capture. Where food delivery had its open API moment, parking has cameras at the gates and a network of over 100 million drivers who have already stored their payment details and opted into seamless experiences through apps they use every day. The infrastructure move is the same. The scale of what it unlocks is just as significant.

What Crossing That Threshold Looks Like

Express Pay is the experience at the center of this shift. The mechanics are straightforward. Drivers enroll once through ParkMobile or ParkWhiz, apps that together reach over 100 million drivers nationwide. From that point forward, the vehicle is the credential. Flash’s Vision LPR cameras read the plate on arrival, the gate opens in around three seconds, and the parking session runs automatically in the background. On exit, the cameras verify, the session closes, the payment clears, and the gate opens again. No stopping. No ticket. No interaction required.

“The best parking experience is actually no parking experience,” Dan said. “You should be able to come and go seamlessly and let all the computers that are in your pocket and in your car take care of payment.”

What matters as much as the experience itself is the architecture behind it. Express Pay is built on an open network, and that was a deliberate design decision. Drivers can enroll through ParkMobile, ParkWhiz, on-site at any participating location, or through a partner channel. The experience is identical regardless of where or how they signed up. Multiple paths in, one consistent outcome. Owners retain full control over pricing, gate behavior, and revenue settings. The kiosk stays at every participating location as a fallback for any driver who wants or needs it. Adoption grows because drivers choose Express Pay, not because they are required to use it.

“Drivers can choose to pay at the kiosk, via mobile, or through Express Pay,” Andy said. “We’re trying to get people used to this, get them on board with it, and help them see the value on their own terms.”

That openness is not incidental. It is the mechanism through which the network effect actually works. Every enrolled driver makes each connected location more valuable. Every new location added makes the network more useful to every enrolled driver. The flywheel that reshaped food delivery is the same one Express Pay is designed to turn.

The Data Already in the Market

The adoption numbers coming out of early Express Pay markets reflect that dynamic in practice.

Philadelphia was the first city where Flash and Arrive set out to build genuine market density, launching Express Pay across more than 30 locations with the explicit goal of proving what the network effect looks like when supply and demand grow together in the same market. The results followed the pattern. Across active Express Pay markets, Flash sees roughly 10% adoption at launch, growing to around 25% within four to six months, with the highest-performing sites well above 75%. Once a driver uses Express Pay, nearly all of them use it again. As Dan said at the Philadelphia launch: “When you can drive into a city, park, and leave without ever stopping to pay, you’ve fundamentally changed the relationship between drivers and destinations.”

The European experience offers the longest view of where this trajectory leads. Arrive has operated camera-based digital parking payments across Europe for eight years, with particular density in the Nordic countries and expanding presence in Spain, Germany, and Italy. In some markets, adoption at participating facilities now exceeds 80%. In several Nordic countries, more than 30% of total industry parking transactions flow through camera-enabled digital payment. In 2025 alone, Arrive processed over 50 million transactions through its European app network. What that data shows is not linear growth. It shows acceleration. Once supply-side density reaches a critical mass in a given market, transaction volume compounds. More locations draw more enrollments. More enrolled drivers make each location more valuable to the next.

“As you grow more supply, more transactions, more users, more cities adopt the solution,” Andy said. “You get to a certain point on the supply side and the transactions accelerate.”

It took eight years to reach that point in Europe. The expectation is that North America moves considerably faster, because the infrastructure lesson has already been learned.

Building for What Comes After This

The case for investing in this infrastructure now extends beyond the payment experiences of today’s drivers. It connects to what parking will need to support as autonomous vehicles become a standard feature of city operations rather than a novelty.

Autonomous vehicles are already on roads in several U.S. cities. They need somewhere to stage between rides. They need to access structured parking and curb space without a human in the loop, and they need to pay for that access automatically using systems that can recognize, authorize, and bill them in real time. That requires the same foundational layer Express Pay is building today: AI-powered cameras capable of reading the real-world complexity of North American plates, open APIs that allow systems to communicate across operators and platforms, and a connected network of supply that spans markets and scales with demand.

“Whether you think the future is about Express Pay or connected cars or EV charging or drone delivery or AV drop-off,” Dan said, “all of these things require the same foundational elements. The technology, the infrastructure you already own, and partnerships.”

The owners, operators, municipalities, and airports that invest in this infrastructure now are not simply improving the payment experience for today’s drivers. They are building the operating layer that the next decade of mobility runs on. The session closed with an open invitation to the industry: join the network, work on the standards together, and be part of what the data already shows is possible.

The Question Is Timing, Not Direction

The tours through Milwaukee this week were not a demonstration of a future state. They were a demonstration of what is already working. The gates opened because the infrastructure was live. The experience was felt because the network exists.

Every industry that has made this transition left behind a clear record of what it took. Better experience came first. Open standards made it scalable. Networks made it compound. The operators and owners who moved when the network was still being built captured the growth. The ones who waited caught up slowly or missed out entirely.

Parking is at that point now. Express Pay is live and growing. Every location that joins strengthens the network for every location already in it. Drivers don’t return to parking lots. They return to places that felt easy.

Bring Express Pay to your locations. Visit expresspay.flashparking.com to learn more and schedule a demo.