Park@Perak is a e-parking coupon app developed to make it easier for Perakians to pay for their parking fare when they park their vehicles in designated space for parking. Before this, we need to buy books of parking coupons and keep them in the car so that we can use the coupon when we need it.

Okay, how is the Park@Perak app any good for us?

1. We don’t need to look for a shop that sells parking coupons when we run out of parking coupons.

2. The app will notify us 5 minutes (sometimes 15 minutes?) before the time is up for the e-parking coupon. Then we can purchase more e-parking coupon to top up our parking time without having to rush to our car to scratch more parking coupon(s).

3. No need to use any more paper parking coupons. Hence more environmentally friendly. And no need to throw used parking coupons away which can accumulate in our cars

4. In the event that a traffic warden mistakenly gave us a parking ticket, we have records of our parking coupons in our app to challenge the decision.

All good. The only downside as far as I can see is I seem to be paying more than I normally would when using the app. You see, sometimes I leave used parking coupons on the dashboard to try to get away from using any parking coupons, especially when I ran out of parking coupons, or when I just needed to make a short trip to the shops from my car. I guess I can still try my luck sometimes, but so far I very religiously use my parking credit after I’ve parked my car. Perhaps it’s fun to use the app, for now lol

The following is a simple how-to for the app. There is a manual in Bahasa Malaysia from the official app website. But I’ll briefly run it through here in English anyway:

1. Registering when you use the app for the first time.

You’ll need to fill in personal details like name, IC number, telephone number, email address and password.

2. Login to the app using the IC number and password that you have just provided in the previous step.

3. Load credit to the app before you can pay for the e-parking coupon. You will need to have an online bank account, which you have access to, and put in at least RM10. The way to access your bank account is via FPX.

Do follow all the on-screen steps, and don’t abruptly exit any of the step to avoid money being taken away from your account but is not loaded to the app yet. This happened to me once when I clicked on “Done” at the bottom of my screen.

I was brought straight back to the app and the app didn’t like it as it interrupted the flow of the process. So money was taken from my account but it did not appear in my app. I had to complain using “Bantuan” available in the app.

4. Add your car number plate for the first time.

The car number plate will be saved in the app so you just need to choose which car you want to purchase e-parking coupon for (you can have multiple car number plates saved in your app).

5. Using the credit for parking.

You will need to choose the municipal you are in (the rate is unified across all municipals in Perak to be RM.30 for half an hour parking), the car and duration you want to pay for. Note that for half hour parking you need to choose 0 hour first because by default the app shows one hour duration to pay for. If your time is about to run out, don’t separately pay for another parking coupon using the steps above. Click on “Tambah masa” (see picture on the right above) instead. If not there will be overlap in time between your previous parking coupon and the one you just paid, thus losing out some parking time lol

Okay I think that’s about it about the app for now. Do chip in if you have any other useful advice.