Have you ever paid for timed parking and then your meeting ran a little longer than you anticipated? By the time you get out you realize you’ve gone over your allotted time but you hustle to your car in the hopes that you haven’t been towed yet.

Local investor Matt Lyons recently returned 15 minutes after he thought his parking time was up (it had actually been expired for about 30 minutes) to see that he had just missed a Parking Enforcement Systems (PES) truck towing his car out of a lot across from the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama (EDPA) on 1st Avenue South in Birmingham.

“I went to a meeting at the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama,” said Lyons. “The parking spots immediately in front of it were filled, but there was a parking lot across the street that had one of those ParkMobile signs.

“And so, I said, okay, well, that’s, that’s easy enough, I’ve used ParkMobile before. And I’ll just park in that lot. And so anyway, I parked in that lot. And I logged into the application and set myself up for three hours of parking. Thinking that it was supposed to end around noon. And, you know, went through the meeting.

“Part of this meeting involved traveling off site and looking at some buildings that that are being developed. So, we did that. And we got back a little bit late, I would say around, you know somewhere between 12:15, 12:30. And my car had been towed.