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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Place where I park my car for work (Gosford, Australia) just got rid of cash payment, they now take card payment only (apparently there is also going to be an app, but they haven’t launched it yet). I think the number one reason is they are upgrading to a new system, and the parking technology vendor doesn’t provide cash payments as a standard option-probably they could implement a custom integration to enable it if they thought it was essential, but cash payments are so rare, it would be a difficult decision to justify. The carpark is owned and operated by the local government, so they need to justify their decisions, either as commercially viable, or else as producing substantial public benefit, but I think both arguments would be difficult to sustain in this case.

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It’s kinda easy to justify though from a financial standpoint. If the parking meters take cash, you need all the hardware to accept and secure the cash. Then you need somebody to go around at some point and actually physically collect the cash. Then someone has to reconcile the cash, etc.

So at least from that angle I see it as an easy “government is actually trying to be more efficient” argument.

As a user cash is a pain in the ass. I have to count it out, keep it in my pockets, etc. So much easier to just tap my phone or my card. But yeah that’s a tradeoff in the classic “You’re trading X for convenience”.

And then you have kids and junkies sticking twigs and gum in the coin mechanism. A card only system can be a single solid slate with minimal upkeep.

Combined with the fact almost no one uses cash in Australia.

Even then with cards they may still need to consider fraud via skimmers, or that the equipment can be vandalized. Going app-only (or vastly reducing the availability of payment machines) means less upkeep for them, but it also moves the kind of fraud to where people have replaced the information or QR codes to scan. It seems like a parallel to what google and whatever entities are pushing them to make these changes are trying to do, at some point someone has to put in work to keep the system working securely and everyone wants to delegate it to someone else.

At least in Australia, skimmers haven’t really been an issue for a long time. Everyone uses paywave / nfc payments. The ticket machines I’ve seen installed lately don’t even have a way to insert the card or a pin pad.

They are in theory still possible to destroy but it’s a lot harder and the little electronics left are cheaper to repair.

There should be a legal requirement then, that there's an office you can go to and buy vouchers with cash, which you can use on the machines. There's no need to collect the cash from all the meters but you can still pay cash.

Don't pay and when you get a fine take them to court and state you don't have a bank card. There's jo wat a council can legally require you to enter into an agreement with a bank to use council run facilities, it's likely nobody's challenged them on it though.

Every council I've lived in has still taken cash for every type of council fee, despite their "official" statement being they don't.

The catch would be you actually need to have zero bank cards. That is extremely unlikely hence no one has done it.

> There's jo wat a council can legally require you to enter into an agreement with a bank to use council run facilities, it's likely nobody's challenged them on it though.

Is there some law saying they can’t?

This is a carpark. If you own a car, you are legally required to hold a CTP insurance policy as a condition of registration-so to be able to use the facility, you legally need to be customer of one type of private financial institution; given that, is it really problematic if council requires you to be a customer of a second kind as well, when close to 100% of the population are?

The next level of parking enshittification is pay-by-license-plate, which is starting to become widespread here in Perth, Australia, even for locations that are free parking, and locations that have parking machines. Surveillance just ratchets upwards.

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