Over the next few months, New York City will place “smart meters” in 300 locations as a part of an experiment to test a pay-by-phone parking system. The one-year pilot program will feature tech that is already used in several other cities including Washington and Atlanta,  which is meant to offer more flexibility than the current coin- and credit-card-based system does.

From the New York Post:

“After a one-time registration online, drivers will simply use an app or text message to enter the number of the meter they are parking at and the amount of time they wish to purchase, said Bruce Schaller, deputy transportation commissioner.”

The new parking meters are also built to send alerts to drivers when they’re about to run out of time,  offering them to purchase extra minutes from their smartphone.

A wider-scale implementation of meters with support for mobile payment would have some obvious advantages on the long run, such as simplified enforcement. There are also some talks about automatic refunds for unused time, though that may not reach the drawing board.

Mobile payments and personal finance services are becoming a huge trend, now that carriers, manufacturers and developers have all started to respond to market demand. American Express and Verizon teamed up this month to install the Serve mobile payments platform as a default program on some of the devices in the latter’s line-up.

Visa in turn is taking on the hardware market, and announced about a week ago that it will be investing in the implementation of EMV chips in phones–the silicon one would normally find in credit cards. The credit giant is also venturing into near-field communications, but other mobile transaction technologies represent its main focus on the near-term.

Overseas, mobile commerce is starting to emerge in the European market.  Estonia-based Fortumo announced operator billing support in over 61 countries last month.