It used to be even better in the sense that you'd only start and then end parking without having to pre select a time. But I think too many people, me included, forgot to end the parking when taking off and paid way more than they actually parked for.
But they don't because they make more money by profiting from people who forget to "clock out" when they are done parking.
They could at least start with adding proper CarPlay and Android Auto support so you can just end the parking from the infotainment. But I think there can be at most a single engineer working on this app if at all. Up until a couple months ago it didn't even have the option for a persistent notification to remind you that you had an ongoing parking...
> But they don't because they make more money by profiting from people who forget to "clock out" when they are done parking.
fwiw, at least in this case, the app that profited from you not clocking out got shut down and bought out by the app that asks you to pre-set your parking time. Which I guess is still not great, but at least somewhat of a step up.
I assume they’re contracted out to the lowest bidder.
In my city the payment schedule on the app significantly lags the meters/official rates. Fine when prices go up, but pretty annoying to app-users when the app charges more than the official parking rates. Maybe if they get their merchant account sanctioned for too many chargebacks someone will take notice.
Here in Nashville, they sold out our public street parking to a private company. Now instead of coins in a meter for the time you want, you have to buy at least an hour for $1.75 (or more), pay by scanning a QR code (which is misprinted on the signs) unless you're in one of the spots where there's a working pay machine, and it now is enforced 24/7 instead of having holidays and weekends off (IIRC it was also free after 6, which was great). Also they had two hour limits where you can't simply move your car, you have to park somewhere they don't check for an indeterminate amount of time. How is any of this an improvement unless you get a cut of the money?
(1) via machine: insert my card into the machine, get ticket, leave
(2) via app: spend 10 minutes registering an account, email, password, phone number, wants verification via email or phone number, wants me to register my credit card and the agree to them selling all my data.
IF on the other hand, they just made it use some kind of common e-cash and no registration, no tracking, no account, I'd be 100% for it.
For places where I don't expect to return (or only rarely), sure, having to do an app is annoying. But for places where you expect to use it often enough, it can be a time-saver, after the initial time cost of setup.
I have seen meters that have smaller increments, like sub-10-minutes, but when the increments cost something like 50 cents, it's hard to really care that much.