Boston, MA: A Blueprint for Modernizing 40 Years of Parking Operations

For four decades, the City of Boston ran its entire parking enforcement and permit program through a single vendor. The contract had grown so complex that city staff couldn’t fully explain how their own systems worked, and the city hadn’t received a single competitive bid in 35 years. When the incumbent signaled it might raise prices or walk away entirely, with only 11 months left on the contract, Boston’s Office of the Parking Clerk faced a choice: stay locked in, or rebuild from the ground up.

In this video, Mia Capone, Director of Parking and Curbside Management for the City of Boston, walks through how her team turned that pressure into a 65-day transformation, joined by Passport CTO Gene Rohrwasser to talk through what that process looked like from a technology partner’s side. Mia shares how Boston broke a single, monolithic contract into five distinct, interoperable modules, ran a market discovery process that drew 33 vendor responses to an RFI after decades of none, and built internal buy-in by training staff to think in outcomes instead of legacy requirements. The result: more than 40 million records migrated with zero service disruption, processing times cut by two-thirds, and a 42% cost reduction on foundational technology services.

Boston’s story is also one of partnership. Throughout the transition, the city worked closely with Passport to design a platform built for flexibility, with hardened integrations across every module and weekly collaboration to keep the system evolving long after go-live.

As Boston’s partner, Passport is proud to support a city that approached modernization with this level of rigor, transparency, and ambition.

Watch the full session below.