This reminds me of a meeting I attended years ago when I worked at a company in the health-care space, and someone had asked why we didn’t have an official mobile app. And a company leader explained, not unkindly, that a lot of the people we were providing services to were not only not well-off, many were in the sort of financial situation where one regularly chooses which utility to pay down a bit and get turned on, and which one(s) to leave shut off for nonpayment, and as such they are not the sort of people who either have smartphones or are accustomed to using smartphones as an interface to the world.
It’s changed a bit according to my wife who works in the healthcare and mental health space in the Northeast US. Nearly everyone has a smartphone including the unhoused. The financial struggles though haven’t changed much.
*nod* When you think about it, being unhoused makes having a mobile phone *less* of a privilege because, if you have housing, you can use WiFi and desktop/laptop PCs and DSL/Cable/Fiber Internet to get better value on your bandwidth and and you might have a job that allows you to work from home, making mobile phones more of a luxury and less of a necessity.
That’s basically why my mum is afraid to go out on her own now. She’s had fears with computers for years, so you can imagine her life when she has to open her smartphone app to get a single use code to access her bank website on her computer to check her balance.
I’m lucky to not have to use a car, so I barely have to deal with parking shit, but I’ve noticed restaurants here in Taiwan (and I’m sure it’s the same in every other countries) have started to reduce their workforce and instead use mobile apps or websites to take orders. I usually pretend I don’t have a smartphone, but I don’t know how long that will work. Of course, when you don’t face a human, it’s almost impossible to have a say in your diet preference or ask anything… I hate technology.
For a long time in Japan, restaurants like ramen joints would just have a kiosk in the corner that you used to buy a ticket and then you gave the ticket to the waiter/cook to actually get your food. I wonder if they’ve all switched to apps in the post-COVID world or stuck with the machines. I haven’t been back since 2015, so I don’t know.
Here in the US, there is a lot of variety. Some places have tablets in the front that you can tap on to order, some have QR code and expect you to order online, and there are still a majority of traditional restaurants where you talk to a person. I will say post-COVID, the prices have gone up a lot and you can’t get a cheap lunch anymore.
Can confirm. I went in March of this year and there were quite a few kiosks. In the larger cities, the kiosks have gotten quite advanced, including multiple language menus and whatnot. If you want the kiosks of old though, you only need to travel just outside the city centers and you’ll find them everywhere.
The best part is that they make eating in restaurants in very rural (read: no English at all) areas much easier. You can just use your phone to translate the menu at your own pace, pick your item, and hand them the same ticket. Of course, it still helps to be able to politely thank the staff for being seated and for bringing your food - a little bit of Japanese goes a long way!
I don’t agree with the edited headline. It implies that the problem is the UX of the parking apps, not the lack of staffing or any non-smartphone payment option.
I had the occasion to pay 2 dollars for 4 hours of parking outside a desirable point of interest in a major US city. This was last month. There is no way the parking provider could have offered that if it were not for the unmanned nature of the plot of land. Renting a spot of land is cheap, the owner just pays the upkeep and taxes. Anything that increases the upkeep will mean a higher cost for me.
Thirty feet closer to the point of interest, the official parking lot, with an attendant and credit card machines, charged 10 dollars for 2 hours. That lot was full when I showed up, so I found the cheaper lot.
It’s your own choice whether to care about people who aren’t good at smartphones or don’t have one. My point was just that the edited title misrepresents the post.
I characterize myself as terrible at smartphones. I also know enough to flag where it’s the dev’s fault, not my own nor the fault of the person I’m talking to.
Better than I. The issue in the post appears to be 3 different options and one app that totally sucks. I used the single parking app visible to me for the parking lot I was in, and while it did take me 5 minutes of annoyance, it did work and kept the next step visible to me. It was not the app the lady in the post used.
And you prefer to endure the 5 minutes of annoyance rather than pay a little more? I doubt the $10 lot was barely scraping by financially, and if it was just a cash/card machine I bet the $2 lot could make it work charging say 25% more. Is your time worth more than $6 an hour?
difference of 2-20 dollars (4 hour parking): 16 dollars. Time it takes to pay with a credit card: 1 minute (assuming it’s not asking me to put a token back in my car windshield). Time it takes to pay with an app: 5 minutes. Savings over the lifetime: 16 dollars for 4 minutes. Price per hour: $240.
My time is worth less than $240/hr right now, yes.
I don’t know why you said “yes” because I didn’t ask if your time is worth less than $240/hr. I asked if your time is worth more than $6 an hour, based on the speculation that the $2 lot could make it work with a cash/card machine by charging 25% more.
Also, the $10 for 2 hours at the other lot seems less about what it costs to run, and more an indication of what people are willing to pay, considering it’s “official” and you only found the cheaper one because the official one was full.
Then I’ll ask if someone who is really struggling… is their time worth more than $6/hr? Is that an expense they are really able to make?
It’s easy to speak from a position of privilege and say parking should be more expensive, because I can afford it and it’s nicer. For those who do not have that privilege, we must remember that the rules in public must be viable for the least advantaged among us.
I write this having done a good bit of work with the “least advantaged” in America and want to acknowledge that’s a class well above even the advantaged in many other countries. We are very blessed, even when we are poor, compared to many many places.
I have found that many homeless actually have smart phones and a data plan. I would actually advocate for them to get one as part of the “shelter” needed in “shelter, water, and food” for survival. The reason is the relatively cheap per month cost of that device opens up to them a world of:
Benefits websites
Job hunting websites
Potential income (meal delivery, etc depending on what form of transport is available)
Document storage
Emergency services
Reachability
Directions to find and get to place X for thing Y.
As much as I dislike a society based around mobile phones, I think they offer vastly disproportionate advantages to the least advantaged than to most of us who can afford to have a “real” computer, some form of abode to keep it in, regular access to food and water and the like. For us it is a want, for them it can literally be their life line. I could afford to keep a smart phone on hand for many years because of my advantage, the homeless I worked with had to keep their smart phone running to keep money coming in.
That makes a lot of sense. So a homeless person with a smartphone is more advantaged than one without a smartphone, so really least advantaged would be those who don’t have a smartphone. Did you intent to express a position on whether that group should be accommodated in publicly accessible services?
Of course they should be accommodated. In my other reply on this thread I point out that I dislike a society that requires smart phone use.
In this reply I’m merely pointing out that when some think “least advantaged” being the homeless, a high percentage that I have run into actually are connected with a smart phone and for very good reasons. This is something I had not considered prior to working with them, so others on this thread might be thinking homeless == no phone. That phone that for you and me is a nice to have is literally a lifeline, which is why I consider it part of their shelter, more important than food and water.
It’s a shame because while our society has made it a vital lifeline, it is also a huge detriment to mental health and executive functioning, speaking from my own experience.
Not really. Things that make life cheaper are better. Things that make life more expensive, even if it’s just a buck or two, really add up and lead to unsustainable cost of living situations.
If it makes things more expensive to those people, then yes. It does no good to add accessibility features if those features bring the costs up.
You might think “Of course there is a point of diminishing returns, but surely this $small_thing is small enough it doesn’t matter.”
As the classic saying goes, the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions. As Grace Hopper put it, programmers have to stop throwing away milliseconds. A small bit of excessive costs here must be rejected, so that everybody rejects excessive costs, and you end up with the milliseconds to spend where you need them.
I can stop bugging you, but if I don’t address an argument that is relevant to something I care about I personally want to receive nudges to think about it and respond – I consider it a sign of respect if someone expects me to treat discussions seriously.
So following the golden rule, I want to offer you the opportunity to address my last few comments and the apparent contradiction between your most recent comment and your earlier comment where you said “the rules in public must be viable for the least advantaged among us.”
A core part of making decisions is weighing two upsides and downsides. My own experience with the various sides of the poverty line has taught me that what is “reasonable and responsible” to someone with the spare cash, becomes unreasonable and makes small things in life much harder on the other side. Quick and easy jobs become more expensive, and events or trips go from “I have some time, let’s do this” to “this quality of life improvement will be forever beyond my capabilities.”
Braille signs are more expensive than printed flat signs. A rule that mandates braille signs inside a car would be stupid, despite increasing accessibility. A rule mandating braille signs in large institutions is defensible, at least.
The most dangerous rules in my mind are those rules that sound Oh So Reasonable and ESPECIALLY the rules that sound great and justify the costs by ignoring them. I know one city where you can’t rent a house until you have a termite inspection done. This raises the cost of renting. Is it worth raising the cost of living beyond the means of a small family burning through savings while job hunting? Is knowing for certain that on a certain date before move-in there were no termites really worth the few bucks a month that inspection will cost that family?
I know that many people who are otherwise struggling will still have a smartphone. These have become cheap and available. Panhandlers in mid-sized East Coast cities will pull out their smartphones to pass the time between red lights. When the light turns red again, they will put away the smartphone and start approaching cars asking for spare change again.
I think what I’m trying to say is that the little costs, such as credit card processing fees, the cost of having a steal-ready cash-box in an unattended parking lot, the cost of having an attendant in a lot, those add up. The cost of “You must make it clear to each car parked how they can pay” is much lower, since the remedies are at least cheaper for the parking lot owner, making the costs lower to the people parking. It may not be much. It really may be only a few pennies. To you or I as we are today, that’s no big deal, and we’d happily pay it for a pleasant customer experience. To others, who are not doing well, we must make sure the laws we propose and implement do not make their lives harder.
Finally, I’m reminded of an old saying. If you see a poor man is eating hamburgers, and a rich man is eating steak, and you believe this to be unfair, banning hamburger will only put that food outside the reach of the poor man.
The most dangerous rules in my mind are those rules that sound Oh So Reasonable and ESPECIALLY the rules that sound great and justify the costs by ignoring them. I know one city where you can’t rent a house until you have a termite inspection done. This raises the cost of renting. Is it worth raising the cost of living beyond the means of a small family burning through savings while job hunting? Is knowing for certain that on a certain date before move-in there were no termites really worth the few bucks a month that inspection will cost that family?
On the other hand, not having that rule could mean less affordable housing stock and much increased rent in the end.
I know that many people who are otherwise struggling will still have a smartphone. These have become cheap and available. Panhandlers in mid-sized East Coast cities will pull out their smartphones to pass the time between red lights. When the light turns red again, they will put away the smartphone and start approaching cars asking for spare change again.
I think what I’m trying to say is that the little costs, such as credit card processing fees, the cost of having a steal-ready cash-box in an unattended parking lot, the cost of having an attendant in a lot, those add up. The cost of “You must make it clear to each car parked how they can pay” is much lower, since the remedies are at least cheaper for the parking lot owner, making the costs lower to the people parking. It may not be much. It really may be only a few pennies. To you or I as we are today, that’s no big deal, and we’d happily pay it for a pleasant customer experience. To others, who are not doing well, we must make sure the laws we propose and implement do not make their lives harder.
So you’re saying that in order to be accommodated in public space, you need to have a smartphone. If you are so unfortunate as to not have one, you don’t count enough.
What you see on the street is not a representative sample. Smartphones do cost money, especially if you factor in the cost of a data plan. As a result, smartphone ownership declines with income; in 2021 76% of Americans making under $30,000 had smartphones:
The cohort of people who are too unfortunate to benefit from what you mean by “make things viable for the least advantaged among us” is potentially larger because it includes people whose phones are dead or whose data plans are not unlimited and have been used up for the month.
The percentage of low-income people with smartphones has no doubt risen since 2021, but this is in part due to the “cost-cutting” measures you defend forcing people to get smartphones in order to be accommodated in public space (thus increasing the cost for those people). If services actually accommodated the least advantaged, more low income people would not have smartphones and could spend their savings on food or housing or even recreation.
The percentage of low-income people with smartphones has no doubt risen since 2021, but this is in part due to the “cost-cutting” measures you defend forcing people to get smartphones in order to be accommodated in public space (thus increasing the cost for those people). If services actually accommodated the least advantaged, more low income people would not have smartphones and could spend their savings on food or housing or even recreation.
If some public spaces accommodate then that’s great for them. I don’t see the reason to make every single public space accommodate, which increases prices across the board for everybody, instead of only those who make the cost-benefit tradeoff. Maybe it will be cheaper for people making under 30k to pay cash for parking. Or maybe it’ll be cheaper in their specific set of circumstances to use cheaper parking on a smartphone app. Individuals are going to be able to make those determinations, and people will grouse. Grousing isn’t the same as being unable to live.
Then as far as I can tell, your position is that there shouldn’t be laws mandating non-smartphone payment options, even if it locks out the least advantaged or costs you time you would rather not spend.
Earlier you seemed to be against non-smartphone payment options, regardless of whether they are mandated by law, on the grounds that they make things more expensive for people who already own a smartphone. Do I understand correctly that you no longer hold this view? Now you would like to see non-smartphone payment options, to save you time or to accommodate the disadvantaged, but you just don’t want it to be mandated by government?
(edit: discussion continued via PM due to max depth constraint.)
If it makes things more expensive to those people, then yes. It does no good to add accessibility features if those features bring the costs up.
What do you mean “yes”? Accessibility features always bring up the monetary costs: braille signs are more expensive than printed flat signs. A machine that can read a card is more expensive than a sticker with a QR code. Which is why I asked if you do or don’t care about making things accessible to the least advantaged, i.e. people without smartphones, or blind people for that matter, and it’s not clear what “yes” means.
As the classic saying goes, the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions. As Grace Hopper put it, programmers have to stop throwing away milliseconds. A small bit of excessive costs here must be rejected, so that everybody rejects excessive costs, and you end up with the milliseconds to spend where you need them.
And in this case you are throwing away minutes in order to save a quarter. By your logic, programmers should throw away milliseconds whenever it lets them ship the product sooner because then the product costs less to produce and can be offered more cheaply, and if users have to spend an extra 4 minutes toiling whenever they use the product it’s worth any monetary savings.
Or make it a law that it should be absolutely evident and understandable at a glance how you can pay to 9 out of 10 randomly selected people so if you find yourself in a situation where it’s not evident how you pay, you just turn on your phone’s camera, record a 360 video and go about your business knowing that you can easily dispute whatever fee they throw at you.
This is probably the best answer. No cost to “plot of land for parking” operators, no cost to people. Just record that you couldn’t clearly tell what’s going on and move on with your day.
Maybe? This entire discussion is severely lacking in generality. People are extrapolating wildly from one ranty post in one US city. I could fake another rant saying that parking is free as long as you scan your eyeballs with Worldcoin and it would add as much data…
Plant asphalt-breaking flora at the edges of the lots. Bermudagrass is a good choice if you can obtain it, but standard mint and thyme will do fine for starters. In some jurisdictions, there may be plants which are legal to possess and propagate, but illegal to remove; these are good choices as well.
We’d can start by not forcing people to use an app to begin with.
In Chicago, they have a kiosk next to a row of on-street parking. You just put in your license plate number, and pay with a credit card. No app needed. At the O’Hare airport, short term parking gives you a receipt when you enter the lot. Then you use it to pay when you exit. No app needed.
Right. The way it used to be everywhere, until relatively recently.
A root problem is that, for a lot of systems like this, a 95% solution is far more profitable than a 99% solution. So companies will happily choose the former. Mildly annoying when the product is a luxury, but for many people access to parking is very much a necessity.
So there’s one way to change this: companies providing necessities have to be held to stronger standards. (Unfortunately in the current US political climate that kind of thing seems very hard.)
You’re talking about public (on-street) parking. This post is talking about private parking lots, which exist for the sole purpose of profit maximization.
The way I see it, the issue is that every random company has to do a positively amazing job of handling edge cases, or else people’s lives get disrupted. This is because every interaction we have with the world is, increasingly, monetized, tracked, and exploited. Most of these companies provide little or no value over just letting local or state governments handle things and relying primarily on cash with an asynchronous backup option. Especially when it comes to cars, this option is well-tested in the arena of highway tolls.
To put it succinctly: stop letting capital insert itself everywhere in our society, and roll back what has already happened.
This seems like it’s just some random for-profit Seattle parking lot (cheap way to go long on a patch of downtown real estate while paying your taxes) that, consistent with the minimal effort the owner is putting in generally, has let whatever back-alley knife fight parking payments startup set up shop as long as they can fork over the dough. It is essentially a non-problem. Even odds the lot won’t exist in two years. There are many more worthwhile things to care about instead.
I disagree. This is going on outside Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities with high population density. Small cities and large towns are finally coming to terms with (using Shoup’s title) the high cost of free parking and replacing meters with kiosks (usually good but not necessarily near where you need to park) or apps (my experience is they’re uniformly bad for all the reasons in the link) to put a price on public parking.
One nearby municipality has all of:
Missing or incorrect signs.
Unclear hours. Is it free after 6pm? Sunday? Holidays? This zone? Seasonally?
Very few kiosks.
QR codes and stale QR codes.
Apps acquired by other app companies and replaced.
Contracts ended or changed where the QR code or app doesn’t work or worse takes the payment but is invalid (this only happened to me once).
Even if you’re local and know the quirks you’ll have to deal with it.
It’s not just “some random for-profit Seattle parking lot”. I’ve run into frustrating and near-impossible experiences trying to pay for parking in plenty of places. Often compounded by the fact that I refuse to install an app to pay with.
The other day I was so happy when I had to go to the downtown of (city I live in) and park for a few minutes and I found a spot with an old-fashioned meter that accepted coins.
Establish a simple interoperable protocol standard, that every parking lot must support by law. Then everyone can use a single app everywhere which fits their needs. I mean, this is about paying for parking, how hard can it be?
I mean, this is about paying for parking, how hard can it be?
I think that’s the thing, though. A company comes in to a municipality and says “this is about paying for parking, we make it easy and you no longer have to have 1) A physical presence, 2) Employees on site, or (possibly) 3) Any way to check if people have paid.” They set you up with a few billboards that have the app listed on them, hire some local outfit to drive through parking lots with license plate readers once or twice a day, and you just “keep the profit.” No need to keep cash on hand, make sure large bills get changed into small bills, deal with pounds of change, give A/C to the poor guy sitting in a hut at the entrance, etc.
I write this having recently taken a vacation and run into this exact issue. It appeared the larger community had outsourced all parking to a particular company who has a somewhat mainline app on the Android and Apple stores, and hence was able to get rid of the city workers who had been sitting around doing almost nothing all day as the beach parking lots filled up early and stayed full. I am very particular about what I run on my phone, but my options were leave the parking lot, drive another 30 minutes in hopes that the next beach had a real attendant with the kids upset, or suck it up. I sucked it up and installed long enough to pay and enough other people were that I don’t see them caring if a few people leave on principle of paying by cash, either way the lot was full.
I say all this to point out that some companies are well on their way to having “the” way to pay for parking already and we might not like the outcome.
I get that digital payment for parking space is less labor intensive (the town could also do that themselves, btw), but we can by law force these companies to provide standardized open APIs over which car drivers can pay for their parking spot, why don’t we do that?
I’m always in favor of citizens promoting laws they feel will improve society, so if you feel that way I’d say go for it! I don’t, personally, think that solves the issue of standardizing on someone needing a smart phone (or other electronic device) with them to pay for parking. That to me is the bigger issue than whose app is required (even if I can write my own, until roughly a year ago I was happily on a flip phone with no data plan). So if this law passes, the company adds the API gateway onto their website and… we’re still headed in a direction for required smart device use.
But, again, I strongly support engaging with your local lawmakers and am plenty happy to have such subjects debated publicly to determine if my view is in the minority and am plenty happy to be outvoted if that is the direction it goes.
I live in South Korea, and the situation here is not much different.
Since the pandemic, many restaurants have laid off or minimized their counter staff, forcing customers to order and pay at poorly implemented kiosks instead. Older people often feel lost in front of a kiosk and don’t know what to do, and the guilt of keeping other customers waiting makes them avoid such restaurants. Worse, these kiosk ordering methods often don’t allow you to see the menu until it’s your turn, so you can’t think about your choices while you’re waiting in line. This is a huge inconvenience not only for older people, but also for younger people who are more comfortable with machines.
You can also find parking spaces in Britain which have app-only payments. The problem is then if it’s in a slightly rural location or you happen to have a phone on the wrong phone network, and you end up spending 10 minutes on trying to get enough connectivity to pay for your parking.
Another thing is also when the app doesn’t show the different time options you can pay for, but just asks you how many hours you would like to park. It seems a bit cheeky if a parking space only allows you to pay for 4 hours or all day. It would then be nice to know those are the thresholds so you can make a more informed decision.
Having tried several of the options mentioned, I’ve found the PayByPhone iPhone app (and the website before that) to be the more usable of the various parking apps in Seattle, and will preferentially use that when there is a choice.
The website flow (as a guest) is:
paybyphone.com
accept cookies (possibly a few times)
type location number in the field and click start parking
click add vehicle (enter license plate, vehicle type and state, click confirm)
type duration in minutes / hours, click continue
enter card number details, an email, etc. agree that you’re not a robot
done
There’s definitely some extraneous stuff in there like vehicle type and state should be defaulted (or omitted).
The app flow (once setup is)
Click app
Click autodetected location that matches the closest sign
choose duration
choose stored card / apple pay
Not sure if that’s the same as the UK PayByPhone but a couple of years ago it was terrible and easily the worst parking app I’d ever had the pleasure of using. Didn’t save card/car details when app was closed, forced me to click through loads of things, reset if I swapped apps (to copy card details).
Came to use it a couple of months ago and expected the same absolutely painful awful experience, only to find it was the absolute opposite. Saves my details, loads quickly, makes it easy to find the right parking spot to pay for and takes payment quickly even on a slightly spotty connection. Colour me totally surprised.
I have an pretty bad experience paying for parking as well. I paid for parking with my mobile phone while standing near my car, got out left to go buy stuff in a store and eat. I wanted to increase the time on the meter come to find out their app uses bluetooth to talk to the actual meter next to my car? Which then meant I was deceived into believing that I could increase my time away from my car?! On top of that the app was also so poorly put together I recall not being able to adjust how much time I wanted to put on the meter. Truly horrible. Honestly at that point the only improvement over the meter is the fact they don’t have to pay someone to empty it.
This reminds me of a meeting I attended years ago when I worked at a company in the health-care space, and someone had asked why we didn’t have an official mobile app. And a company leader explained, not unkindly, that a lot of the people we were providing services to were not only not well-off, many were in the sort of financial situation where one regularly chooses which utility to pay down a bit and get turned on, and which one(s) to leave shut off for nonpayment, and as such they are not the sort of people who either have smartphones or are accustomed to using smartphones as an interface to the world.
What a job we’ve done forcing people to prioritize having a smartphone over heat or electricity or a home.
It’s changed a bit according to my wife who works in the healthcare and mental health space in the Northeast US. Nearly everyone has a smartphone including the unhoused. The financial struggles though haven’t changed much.
*nod* When you think about it, being unhoused makes having a mobile phone *less* of a privilege because, if you have housing, you can use WiFi and desktop/laptop PCs and DSL/Cable/Fiber Internet to get better value on your bandwidth and and you might have a job that allows you to work from home, making mobile phones more of a luxury and less of a necessity.
That’s basically why my mum is afraid to go out on her own now. She’s had fears with computers for years, so you can imagine her life when she has to open her smartphone app to get a single use code to access her bank website on her computer to check her balance.
I’m lucky to not have to use a car, so I barely have to deal with parking shit, but I’ve noticed restaurants here in Taiwan (and I’m sure it’s the same in every other countries) have started to reduce their workforce and instead use mobile apps or websites to take orders. I usually pretend I don’t have a smartphone, but I don’t know how long that will work. Of course, when you don’t face a human, it’s almost impossible to have a say in your diet preference or ask anything… I hate technology.
For a long time in Japan, restaurants like ramen joints would just have a kiosk in the corner that you used to buy a ticket and then you gave the ticket to the waiter/cook to actually get your food. I wonder if they’ve all switched to apps in the post-COVID world or stuck with the machines. I haven’t been back since 2015, so I don’t know.
Here in the US, there is a lot of variety. Some places have tablets in the front that you can tap on to order, some have QR code and expect you to order online, and there are still a majority of traditional restaurants where you talk to a person. I will say post-COVID, the prices have gone up a lot and you can’t get a cheap lunch anymore.
Japan still strongly prefers kiosks everywhere, not only restaurants. It’s used for train stations, amusement parks, parking, etc.
Some restaurants will provide a tablet per table to order from in addition to printed menus.
Can confirm. I went in March of this year and there were quite a few kiosks. In the larger cities, the kiosks have gotten quite advanced, including multiple language menus and whatnot. If you want the kiosks of old though, you only need to travel just outside the city centers and you’ll find them everywhere.
The best part is that they make eating in restaurants in very rural (read: no English at all) areas much easier. You can just use your phone to translate the menu at your own pace, pick your item, and hand them the same ticket. Of course, it still helps to be able to politely thank the staff for being seated and for bringing your food - a little bit of Japanese goes a long way!
I don’t agree with the edited headline. It implies that the problem is the UX of the parking apps, not the lack of staffing or any non-smartphone payment option.
At least the edited headline gives a fig leaf to the notion that this entire submission is on-topic. I don’t believe it is.
then instead of “at least” shouldn’t it be “even worse”?
Heh, maybe.
Why can’t it be both?
The thrust of the article is that it is both, so this headline (“difficult ux in parking apps”) is a mischaracterization.
I had the occasion to pay 2 dollars for 4 hours of parking outside a desirable point of interest in a major US city. This was last month. There is no way the parking provider could have offered that if it were not for the unmanned nature of the plot of land. Renting a spot of land is cheap, the owner just pays the upkeep and taxes. Anything that increases the upkeep will mean a higher cost for me.
Thirty feet closer to the point of interest, the official parking lot, with an attendant and credit card machines, charged 10 dollars for 2 hours. That lot was full when I showed up, so I found the cheaper lot.
It’s your own choice whether to care about people who aren’t good at smartphones or don’t have one. My point was just that the edited title misrepresents the post.
I characterize myself as terrible at smartphones. I also know enough to flag where it’s the dev’s fault, not my own nor the fault of the person I’m talking to.
Yeah, the post should be tagged as rant
If you are terrible at smartphones, how would you characterize the lady in the post?
Better than I. The issue in the post appears to be 3 different options and one app that totally sucks. I used the single parking app visible to me for the parking lot I was in, and while it did take me 5 minutes of annoyance, it did work and kept the next step visible to me. It was not the app the lady in the post used.
And you prefer to endure the 5 minutes of annoyance rather than pay a little more? I doubt the $10 lot was barely scraping by financially, and if it was just a cash/card machine I bet the $2 lot could make it work charging say 25% more. Is your time worth more than $6 an hour?
difference of 2-20 dollars (4 hour parking): 16 dollars. Time it takes to pay with a credit card: 1 minute (assuming it’s not asking me to put a token back in my car windshield). Time it takes to pay with an app: 5 minutes. Savings over the lifetime: 16 dollars for 4 minutes. Price per hour: $240.
My time is worth less than $240/hr right now, yes.
I don’t know why you said “yes” because I didn’t ask if your time is worth less than $240/hr. I asked if your time is worth more than $6 an hour, based on the speculation that the $2 lot could make it work with a cash/card machine by charging 25% more.
Also, the $10 for 2 hours at the other lot seems less about what it costs to run, and more an indication of what people are willing to pay, considering it’s “official” and you only found the cheaper one because the official one was full.
Then I’ll ask if someone who is really struggling… is their time worth more than $6/hr? Is that an expense they are really able to make?
It’s easy to speak from a position of privilege and say parking should be more expensive, because I can afford it and it’s nicer. For those who do not have that privilege, we must remember that the rules in public must be viable for the least advantaged among us.
Yeah, and the least advantaged among us may not have a smartphone, so where does this push for smartphone-only services come from?
I write this having done a good bit of work with the “least advantaged” in America and want to acknowledge that’s a class well above even the advantaged in many other countries. We are very blessed, even when we are poor, compared to many many places.
I have found that many homeless actually have smart phones and a data plan. I would actually advocate for them to get one as part of the “shelter” needed in “shelter, water, and food” for survival. The reason is the relatively cheap per month cost of that device opens up to them a world of:
As much as I dislike a society based around mobile phones, I think they offer vastly disproportionate advantages to the least advantaged than to most of us who can afford to have a “real” computer, some form of abode to keep it in, regular access to food and water and the like. For us it is a want, for them it can literally be their life line. I could afford to keep a smart phone on hand for many years because of my advantage, the homeless I worked with had to keep their smart phone running to keep money coming in.
That makes a lot of sense. So a homeless person with a smartphone is more advantaged than one without a smartphone, so really least advantaged would be those who don’t have a smartphone. Did you intent to express a position on whether that group should be accommodated in publicly accessible services?
Of course they should be accommodated. In my other reply on this thread I point out that I dislike a society that requires smart phone use.
In this reply I’m merely pointing out that when some think “least advantaged” being the homeless, a high percentage that I have run into actually are connected with a smart phone and for very good reasons. This is something I had not considered prior to working with them, so others on this thread might be thinking homeless == no phone. That phone that for you and me is a nice to have is literally a lifeline, which is why I consider it part of their shelter, more important than food and water.
It’s a shame because while our society has made it a vital lifeline, it is also a huge detriment to mental health and executive functioning, speaking from my own experience.
We are in complete agreement there.
Did you change your mind?
Not really. Things that make life cheaper are better. Things that make life more expensive, even if it’s just a buck or two, really add up and lead to unsustainable cost of living situations.
So you don’t actually care about making things accessible to the least advantaged, AND you don’t think your time is worth $6/hr?
If it makes things more expensive to those people, then yes. It does no good to add accessibility features if those features bring the costs up.
You might think “Of course there is a point of diminishing returns, but surely this $small_thing is small enough it doesn’t matter.”
As the classic saying goes, the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions. As Grace Hopper put it, programmers have to stop throwing away milliseconds. A small bit of excessive costs here must be rejected, so that everybody rejects excessive costs, and you end up with the milliseconds to spend where you need them.
I can stop bugging you, but if I don’t address an argument that is relevant to something I care about I personally want to receive nudges to think about it and respond – I consider it a sign of respect if someone expects me to treat discussions seriously.
So following the golden rule, I want to offer you the opportunity to address my last few comments and the apparent contradiction between your most recent comment and your earlier comment where you said “the rules in public must be viable for the least advantaged among us.”
I appreciate it.
A core part of making decisions is weighing two upsides and downsides. My own experience with the various sides of the poverty line has taught me that what is “reasonable and responsible” to someone with the spare cash, becomes unreasonable and makes small things in life much harder on the other side. Quick and easy jobs become more expensive, and events or trips go from “I have some time, let’s do this” to “this quality of life improvement will be forever beyond my capabilities.”
Braille signs are more expensive than printed flat signs. A rule that mandates braille signs inside a car would be stupid, despite increasing accessibility. A rule mandating braille signs in large institutions is defensible, at least.
The most dangerous rules in my mind are those rules that sound Oh So Reasonable and ESPECIALLY the rules that sound great and justify the costs by ignoring them. I know one city where you can’t rent a house until you have a termite inspection done. This raises the cost of renting. Is it worth raising the cost of living beyond the means of a small family burning through savings while job hunting? Is knowing for certain that on a certain date before move-in there were no termites really worth the few bucks a month that inspection will cost that family?
I know that many people who are otherwise struggling will still have a smartphone. These have become cheap and available. Panhandlers in mid-sized East Coast cities will pull out their smartphones to pass the time between red lights. When the light turns red again, they will put away the smartphone and start approaching cars asking for spare change again.
I think what I’m trying to say is that the little costs, such as credit card processing fees, the cost of having a steal-ready cash-box in an unattended parking lot, the cost of having an attendant in a lot, those add up. The cost of “You must make it clear to each car parked how they can pay” is much lower, since the remedies are at least cheaper for the parking lot owner, making the costs lower to the people parking. It may not be much. It really may be only a few pennies. To you or I as we are today, that’s no big deal, and we’d happily pay it for a pleasant customer experience. To others, who are not doing well, we must make sure the laws we propose and implement do not make their lives harder.
Finally, I’m reminded of an old saying. If you see a poor man is eating hamburgers, and a rich man is eating steak, and you believe this to be unfair, banning hamburger will only put that food outside the reach of the poor man.
On the other hand, not having that rule could mean less affordable housing stock and much increased rent in the end.
So you’re saying that in order to be accommodated in public space, you need to have a smartphone. If you are so unfortunate as to not have one, you don’t count enough.
What you see on the street is not a representative sample. Smartphones do cost money, especially if you factor in the cost of a data plan. As a result, smartphone ownership declines with income; in 2021 76% of Americans making under $30,000 had smartphones:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
The cohort of people who are too unfortunate to benefit from what you mean by “make things viable for the least advantaged among us” is potentially larger because it includes people whose phones are dead or whose data plans are not unlimited and have been used up for the month.
The percentage of low-income people with smartphones has no doubt risen since 2021, but this is in part due to the “cost-cutting” measures you defend forcing people to get smartphones in order to be accommodated in public space (thus increasing the cost for those people). If services actually accommodated the least advantaged, more low income people would not have smartphones and could spend their savings on food or housing or even recreation.
If some public spaces accommodate then that’s great for them. I don’t see the reason to make every single public space accommodate, which increases prices across the board for everybody, instead of only those who make the cost-benefit tradeoff. Maybe it will be cheaper for people making under 30k to pay cash for parking. Or maybe it’ll be cheaper in their specific set of circumstances to use cheaper parking on a smartphone app. Individuals are going to be able to make those determinations, and people will grouse. Grousing isn’t the same as being unable to live.
Then as far as I can tell, your position is that there shouldn’t be laws mandating non-smartphone payment options, even if it locks out the least advantaged or costs you time you would rather not spend.
Earlier you seemed to be against non-smartphone payment options, regardless of whether they are mandated by law, on the grounds that they make things more expensive for people who already own a smartphone. Do I understand correctly that you no longer hold this view? Now you would like to see non-smartphone payment options, to save you time or to accommodate the disadvantaged, but you just don’t want it to be mandated by government?
(edit: discussion continued via PM due to max depth constraint.)
What do you mean “yes”? Accessibility features always bring up the monetary costs: braille signs are more expensive than printed flat signs. A machine that can read a card is more expensive than a sticker with a QR code. Which is why I asked if you do or don’t care about making things accessible to the least advantaged, i.e. people without smartphones, or blind people for that matter, and it’s not clear what “yes” means.
And in this case you are throwing away minutes in order to save a quarter. By your logic, programmers should throw away milliseconds whenever it lets them ship the product sooner because then the product costs less to produce and can be offered more cheaply, and if users have to spend an extra 4 minutes toiling whenever they use the product it’s worth any monetary savings.
How do we change it?
Make it a law that paid parking lots have to accept payment by cash?
“To pay with cash please buy a single-use code in one of the authorized points” (nearest one 2 districts away, opening tomorrow morning).
I agree with the spirit of what you said though.
You are experienced with the dark patterns, sir
Or make it a law that it should be absolutely evident and understandable at a glance how you can pay to 9 out of 10 randomly selected people so if you find yourself in a situation where it’s not evident how you pay, you just turn on your phone’s camera, record a 360 video and go about your business knowing that you can easily dispute whatever fee they throw at you.
This is probably the best answer. No cost to “plot of land for parking” operators, no cost to people. Just record that you couldn’t clearly tell what’s going on and move on with your day.
Ah yes, big cash boxes under unmotivated observation, sitting out in public. That won’t raise the cost of parking.
Has parking become cheaper when those boxes were replaced with apps?
Maybe? This entire discussion is severely lacking in generality. People are extrapolating wildly from one ranty post in one US city. I could fake another rant saying that parking is free as long as you scan your eyeballs with Worldcoin and it would add as much data…
Plant asphalt-breaking flora at the edges of the lots. Bermudagrass is a good choice if you can obtain it, but standard mint and thyme will do fine for starters. In some jurisdictions, there may be plants which are legal to possess and propagate, but illegal to remove; these are good choices as well.
We’d can start by not forcing people to use an app to begin with.
In Chicago, they have a kiosk next to a row of on-street parking. You just put in your license plate number, and pay with a credit card. No app needed. At the O’Hare airport, short term parking gives you a receipt when you enter the lot. Then you use it to pay when you exit. No app needed.
Right. The way it used to be everywhere, until relatively recently.
A root problem is that, for a lot of systems like this, a 95% solution is far more profitable than a 99% solution. So companies will happily choose the former. Mildly annoying when the product is a luxury, but for many people access to parking is very much a necessity.
So there’s one way to change this: companies providing necessities have to be held to stronger standards. (Unfortunately in the current US political climate that kind of thing seems very hard.)
You’re talking about public (on-street) parking. This post is talking about private parking lots, which exist for the sole purpose of profit maximization.
The cities could pass laws to regulate the payment methods. Parking lots that don’t confirm can be shut down.
Depending on the city, getting such regulations passed may be difficult though.
The way I see it, the issue is that every random company has to do a positively amazing job of handling edge cases, or else people’s lives get disrupted. This is because every interaction we have with the world is, increasingly, monetized, tracked, and exploited. Most of these companies provide little or no value over just letting local or state governments handle things and relying primarily on cash with an asynchronous backup option. Especially when it comes to cars, this option is well-tested in the arena of highway tolls.
To put it succinctly: stop letting capital insert itself everywhere in our society, and roll back what has already happened.
First do no harm. Don’t build stuff like this.
Learn and follow best practices for device independence and accessibility. Contrast. Alt text. No here links. No text rendered with images.
Those are things we can and should do.
But likely things like this won’t change until there are law suits and such. Sigh.
This seems like it’s just some random for-profit Seattle parking lot (cheap way to go long on a patch of downtown real estate while paying your taxes) that, consistent with the minimal effort the owner is putting in generally, has let whatever back-alley knife fight parking payments startup set up shop as long as they can fork over the dough. It is essentially a non-problem. Even odds the lot won’t exist in two years. There are many more worthwhile things to care about instead.
I disagree. This is going on outside Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities with high population density. Small cities and large towns are finally coming to terms with (using Shoup’s title) the high cost of free parking and replacing meters with kiosks (usually good but not necessarily near where you need to park) or apps (my experience is they’re uniformly bad for all the reasons in the link) to put a price on public parking.
One nearby municipality has all of:
Even if you’re local and know the quirks you’ll have to deal with it.
It’s not just “some random for-profit Seattle parking lot”. I’ve run into frustrating and near-impossible experiences trying to pay for parking in plenty of places. Often compounded by the fact that I refuse to install an app to pay with.
The other day I was so happy when I had to go to the downtown of (city I live in) and park for a few minutes and I found a spot with an old-fashioned meter that accepted coins.
History does not bear you out.
What?
Establish a simple interoperable protocol standard, that every parking lot must support by law. Then everyone can use a single app everywhere which fits their needs. I mean, this is about paying for parking, how hard can it be?
I think that’s the thing, though. A company comes in to a municipality and says “this is about paying for parking, we make it easy and you no longer have to have 1) A physical presence, 2) Employees on site, or (possibly) 3) Any way to check if people have paid.” They set you up with a few billboards that have the app listed on them, hire some local outfit to drive through parking lots with license plate readers once or twice a day, and you just “keep the profit.” No need to keep cash on hand, make sure large bills get changed into small bills, deal with pounds of change, give A/C to the poor guy sitting in a hut at the entrance, etc.
I write this having recently taken a vacation and run into this exact issue. It appeared the larger community had outsourced all parking to a particular company who has a somewhat mainline app on the Android and Apple stores, and hence was able to get rid of the city workers who had been sitting around doing almost nothing all day as the beach parking lots filled up early and stayed full. I am very particular about what I run on my phone, but my options were leave the parking lot, drive another 30 minutes in hopes that the next beach had a real attendant with the kids upset, or suck it up. I sucked it up and installed long enough to pay and enough other people were that I don’t see them caring if a few people leave on principle of paying by cash, either way the lot was full.
I say all this to point out that some companies are well on their way to having “the” way to pay for parking already and we might not like the outcome.
I get that digital payment for parking space is less labor intensive (the town could also do that themselves, btw), but we can by law force these companies to provide standardized open APIs over which car drivers can pay for their parking spot, why don’t we do that?
I’m always in favor of citizens promoting laws they feel will improve society, so if you feel that way I’d say go for it! I don’t, personally, think that solves the issue of standardizing on someone needing a smart phone (or other electronic device) with them to pay for parking. That to me is the bigger issue than whose app is required (even if I can write my own, until roughly a year ago I was happily on a flip phone with no data plan). So if this law passes, the company adds the API gateway onto their website and… we’re still headed in a direction for required smart device use.
But, again, I strongly support engaging with your local lawmakers and am plenty happy to have such subjects debated publicly to determine if my view is in the minority and am plenty happy to be outvoted if that is the direction it goes.
I live in South Korea, and the situation here is not much different.
Since the pandemic, many restaurants have laid off or minimized their counter staff, forcing customers to order and pay at poorly implemented kiosks instead. Older people often feel lost in front of a kiosk and don’t know what to do, and the guilt of keeping other customers waiting makes them avoid such restaurants. Worse, these kiosk ordering methods often don’t allow you to see the menu until it’s your turn, so you can’t think about your choices while you’re waiting in line. This is a huge inconvenience not only for older people, but also for younger people who are more comfortable with machines.
You can also find parking spaces in Britain which have app-only payments. The problem is then if it’s in a slightly rural location or you happen to have a phone on the wrong phone network, and you end up spending 10 minutes on trying to get enough connectivity to pay for your parking.
Another thing is also when the app doesn’t show the different time options you can pay for, but just asks you how many hours you would like to park. It seems a bit cheeky if a parking space only allows you to pay for 4 hours or all day. It would then be nice to know those are the thresholds so you can make a more informed decision.
Having tried several of the options mentioned, I’ve found the PayByPhone iPhone app (and the website before that) to be the more usable of the various parking apps in Seattle, and will preferentially use that when there is a choice.
The website flow (as a guest) is:
There’s definitely some extraneous stuff in there like vehicle type and state should be defaulted (or omitted).
The app flow (once setup is) Click app Click autodetected location that matches the closest sign choose duration choose stored card / apple pay
Not sure if that’s the same as the UK PayByPhone but a couple of years ago it was terrible and easily the worst parking app I’d ever had the pleasure of using. Didn’t save card/car details when app was closed, forced me to click through loads of things, reset if I swapped apps (to copy card details).
Came to use it a couple of months ago and expected the same absolutely painful awful experience, only to find it was the absolute opposite. Saves my details, loads quickly, makes it easy to find the right parking spot to pay for and takes payment quickly even on a slightly spotty connection. Colour me totally surprised.
I have an pretty bad experience paying for parking as well. I paid for parking with my mobile phone while standing near my car, got out left to go buy stuff in a store and eat. I wanted to increase the time on the meter come to find out their app uses bluetooth to talk to the actual meter next to my car? Which then meant I was deceived into believing that I could increase my time away from my car?! On top of that the app was also so poorly put together I recall not being able to adjust how much time I wanted to put on the meter. Truly horrible. Honestly at that point the only improvement over the meter is the fact they don’t have to pay someone to empty it.
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