The Ministry of Transport’s project allowing “post-payment” for parking meters has been posted for discussion. The relevance of the new rules has increased due to regular communication outages

The Ministry of Transport has developed a draft amendment to the federal law “On the Organization of Road Traffic,” which contains two important proposals regarding paid parking.

The first proposal expands the provision of the current law - that it should be possible to pay for parking both in non-cash form and in cash. The Ministry of Transport proposes to oblige regions to also provide certain (this is not specified) alternative payment methods.

Note that paying for paid parking in cash is now very difficult - not everywhere this option is provided; there is either payment through applications, or via SMS, or through parking meters that do not accept cash.

The second proposal is that users of paid parking lots, the entry and exit of which are not equipped with control means, will be able to pay for the service within 24 hours from the moment they start using it. This, the Ministry of Transport believes, “will make payment more flexible and reduce the administrative burden on drivers.”

Of course, it will - the relevance of this proposal has grown greatly in recent months, when, due to “security threats,” there are massive mobile Internet outages, and it becomes impossible to pay for parking through the appropriate applications. It is not easy to prove later that the driver was unable to pay for reasons beyond his control: first there will be a fine, and only then you have to appeal it, waste time and effort - and not everyone goes this route...

The need for postpaid parking has been talked about for a long time.

Somewhere this opportunity already exists - including in the Moscow region, Krasnodar, and Yekaterinburg. In Moscow, you can change the start or end time of the “parking session” until the end of the current day.

Finally, in St. Petersburg, at the end of March, the government adopted a resolution that also allows you to change an incorrectly specified car number, parking zone number, or end time of a parking session by the end of the current day.

Prior to this (Novaya Gazeta talked about this ), throughout the year the Yabloko faction in the St. Petersburg parliament proposed introducing “post-payment” parking, and in November 2025 the corresponding bill was approved by the parliamentary commission on transport. However, in February 2026 they refused to include it on the agenda of the Legislative Assembly, and on March 27, 2026, the city government issued its resolution, only partially implementing the Yabloko proposals.

Smolny never introduced the ability to pay for parking until 11:59 pm on the same day, regardless of whether the first payment attempt was successful. Meanwhile, in recent months, in the northern capital, there have been regular reports of mobile Internet outages for known reasons - and it is simply impossible to pay for parking on time. So conscientious drivers turn out to be “violators” and receive fines (currently it is 3,000 rubles, but Smolny has already proposed to increase it further).

The Ministry of Transport project was supported by the Yabloko faction, but the head of the faction, Olga Shtannikova, proposed increasing the time during which one can pay for parking from 1 to 5 days - the same way as when driving on toll roads. Because we are talking about people who cannot pay for parking on time because of what is happening with the Internet, and these are conscientious car owners, not malicious violators. She also recalled that paid parking was initially introduced not for fiscal purposes, but to relieve congestion on highways, and fines should not be the main goal of the executive branch.

Kirill Yankov, a member of the public council of the Ministry of Transport of Russia, also agrees with the need to increase the payment time to five days.

In his opinion, one day is not enough to pay for parking - what if the mobile Internet does not appear in a day?

The discussion of the Ministry of Transport project will last until June 26, then it should be finalized based on the results of the discussion and introduced on behalf of the government - in general, most likely, it will be adopted only in the fall, by the new composition of the State Duma.

In the meantime, in St. Petersburg they are going to expand the paid parking zone again.

Vladimir Maksimov