Mobile electronic payments are making parking easier across the U.S.

Instead of hunting down loose change for a meter, pulling out one's phone can be a lot easier when paying the bill for a parking space. That's what people in San Francisco and nearly 60 other cities and university campuses across the United States and Canada - as well as locations in the United Kingdom and France - are finding out. The ease of mobile electronic payments has come to the streets of major cities via a company called PayByPhone, according to PYMNTS.com. Using PayByPhone, people can pay by calling a toll-free number that drivers will find posted on meters or by using a free mobile app that lets them store a debit, credit card or ACH card on file. San Franciscans were the first to have the parking service in the U.S. and have shown a preference for using the toll free number, said Neil Podmore, PayByPhone's vice president of business development.. "[Parking] is a big industry within North America and in markets like Latin America and Asia where you have big cities growing rapidly," Podmore told the website. "We see our niche in the payments marketplace as being very much tied into people on the move."