Autocar research has found that 83% of motorists would prefer to use cash or contactless payment machines in car parks over smartphone apps.
Feedback revealed that people don't like having to download so many apps (there are more than 30 across the UK), worry about online fraud and worry that the apps are too complex.
Dennis Reed, director of campaign group Silver Voices, called the abandonment of pay-and-display machines "blatant ageism". I'm with him.
I reckon there's more to people's dissatisfaction with online payment than complexity or fraud, too. It's not that we can't use this stuff - it's that we don't want to. I think that people have had enough of the mission creep of surveillance and data gathering and that there's a fear not of fraud but of poor tactics from parking providers.
Last year, I wrote twice about my family's parking travails. One relative drove into a car park, tried to get the online payment to work, couldn't and got hit with a £100 fine for spending five minutes trying to do so. Another paid for the wrong car park in his town on an app (there are two) so was fined. Both appealed successfully.
All of this is administrated by numberplate-recognition cameras and a computer that prints and sends nasty letters to unsuspecting drivers, who then have to go through a stressful, time-consuming and uncertain system of appeal. If either of those car parks had a payment machine, neither of these dramas would have happened.
I'm not one for reminiscences. But in the old days, you paid your cash, you got a chit to show you'd rented your space and that was the end of it. The government is promising to 'streamline' the app system. It should be insisting there's a payment machine at every car park.
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Why not, if you use Carparks a lot, pay a yearly subscription, then you receive a sticker to fix to your windshield,so when you approach it reads your reg in and out?, no need for machines, just another antisocial piece of life which is getting more common by the day.
The use of a phone shouldn't be mandatory, just optionnal.
You can't force the drivers to have a mobile with a subcription.
Here in France, they talk about the removal of the medecines handbooks which would be replaced by a QR code.
I find this scandalous.
If they went 100% then there would be no need for parking ticket machines, no need to empty them of cash and no need to pay to run them, service them etc. So it should make parking cheaper.... but will that ever happen? (The boomers and luddites love their cash ticket machines so it won't get any cheaper whilst councils have to manage both apps and physical machines)