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Jun 26, 2023

Pay and dismay: the nightmare of ‘smart’ parking apps

Lara King In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the

Lara King

In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the ‘wilfully unhelpful’ ticket machines in car parks: ‘You go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn't make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions before committing himself and then tries to insert his money through the ticket slot. The remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally – mark this, intentionally – designed to flood your life with unhappiness.’

While these apps are an annoyance for me, they’re positively prohibitive for those without smartphones

Almost three decades later, you’d be lucky to find a parking meter at all. Pay-and-display machines across Britain are disappearing in favour of cashless ‘smart’ parking using mobile phone apps. It was reported this month that more than two million drivers will soon live in ‘parking meter deserts’ where the only way to pay for parking is via a smartphone.

If my experience is anything to go by, Bryson's account could perhaps be updated for the present era: you go hunting for some distant sign to tell you which of the seven parking apps on your phone to use to pay, only to find that the required one won't open without you updating to the ‘latest version’. You wait on a download over patchy 5G reception, and once the thing finally completes you must remember your username and password (how many capital letters did this one need?), then consult the sign again to find out which five digits represent the parking zone you’re in. You re-enter your car make, model and registration, painstakingly type out your credit card details – and then while you wait for the app to connect to your bank to validate the payment, you realise it's all taken so long that you’ve missed your train/hospital appointment/dinner reservation anyway.

There are as many as 30 different parking apps in use in the UK, and about half seem to have found their way on to my phone. All have upbeat, encouraging slogans (RingGo: ‘Parking made easy’; PayByPhone: ‘Simple, worry-free parking’) that I have found to be patently untrue.

I live on the border of three London boroughs that all use different apps, so any trip to the dentist/vet/hairdresser involves remembering which road requires which before you begin the game of trying to get it to work. Phone out of battery, out of signal or out of memory? You’re out of luck.

Even if you can access the app, the frustrations don't end there. Sometimes it tells you the car park you’re standing in doesn't exist; other times it simply refuses to take your money. I was trying to park in Chiswick, west London, recently when an app glitch meant that every time I tapped the screen to pay I was told: ‘Unfortunately you’ve taken too much time to confirm your parking and your quote has expired.’ Over in Ealing, I entered the location number from the road sign I’d parked next to and up came the message: ‘Sorry, that zone does not exist.’ I eventually learned that the area had just made the switch from Ringo to PayByPhone – but none of the road signs had yet been updated. I couldn't find a way to pay for my parking as there wasn't a meter in sight – perhaps no surprise when this particular council had 196 machines in 2016 but will have just 60 by the end of this year.

Other apps come with additional costs. On a visit to Harrogate, I downloaded AppyParking (‘Make parking forgettable’ – if only), set up an account, entered my vehicle registration and handed over my credit card details. Only once I had done all this did I learn that it added a 20p ‘convenience fee’ for my troubles. Fortunately in Harrogate there are still roadside parking meters, so I abandoned the app and used those instead – but for how long will that be an option?

Already at least 13 councils in England and Wales have made parking completely cashless – but countless more have, like Ealing, slashed the number of meters on their streets. Local authorities claim it saves money and reduces incidents of vandalism and theft. But there may be other benefits for them, too. Last year, Freedom of Information data showed councils collected £158 million in parking fines across areas that offered a cash payment option – and £257 million across those that did not.

While these apps are an annoyance for me, they’re positively prohibitive for those who don't have smartphones – or struggle to use them. Nearly a fifth of drivers in the UK are over the age of 65 – more than seven million people – but only 69 per cent of this age group used a smartphone in 2021, the latest year for which figures are available. Dame Esther Rantzen has warned that confusion and uncertainty around app payments could leave some older people ‘imprisoned at home’.

A poll commissioned by the Daily Mail recently found that more than half of over-65s do not want to use parking apps – and four in ten respondents of all ages said they would be put off going to town centres that lacked parking meters. This month, the Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove intervened, writing to local authorities across England to say that forcing drivers to use smartphones to pay for parking is unfair.

Of course, cash parking meters weren't perfect. They could chew up your ticket, swallow your change or refuse to dish out change at all (as Bryson wrote: ‘You can't tell me that a machine that can recognise and reject any foreign coin ever produced couldn't make change if it wanted to’). But they had nothing on the very particular frustrations that come with ‘smart’ parking apps.

I can't help thinking it's just another tactic – along with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, the ever-expanding Ulez and congestion charges everywhere from Bath to Birmingham – to try to force drivers out of their cars entirely. ‘There isn't a single feature of driving in Britain that has even the tiniest measure of enjoyment in it,’ wrote Bryson in 1995 – proof, perhaps, that some things haven't changed.

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Lara King

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