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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of businesses that have a semi-captive hold on a market. Like a recent example was I drove my daughter and I to a stage play, and to pay for street parking I had to install an app, make an account, and add a credit card. A thing that should have been scan the QR code and click one button to mobile pay became a five minute ordeal.

In theory we could have gotten back in the car and looked for parking elsewhere but the curtain was in 30 minutes and who's to say they didn't have a contract with the city that covered all the parking?

Overall a very hostile experience and I was annoyed about how little I felt I had a choice in it.

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Just don’t pay. I stopped paying for street parking a long time ago (around the time they started insisting on apps). You get a ticket once and awhile but it all works out.

Mail in a check a few times a year and park whenever you want.

Valid, though I expect this being down the block from the festival theatre, it probably was being actively patrolled. I was a bit shaken by a prominent sign threatening a $400 fine for illegal parking, though having just checked the website for the City of Stratford, it looks like the standard municipal parking ticket is $40 if paid promptly, so the $400 fine was probably specific to parking in the theatre's dropoff zone or fire access or something.

All that say, I think you're probably right... next time instead of using my phone to install and sign up for a parking app, I'll just use it to check what the fine is and wipe hands on pants.

Yeah usually that’s for fire parking etc. loading zones don’t usually get the super high fine treatment.

It's all fun and games until your ride gets towed.

I have like 5 parking apps. It's exhausting.

The worst part is not that, but.. _which is the app for this area?_

It's definitely a case where I see the value of the Asia-style super apps, where you just attach transactions like this to LINE or Grab or whatever, and everyone knows what to do with it.

The only thing remotely comparable in Toronto might be if Presto (payment app for multiple transit agencies in GTHA) took on parking payment, but the Presto network now supports just tapping a credit card so I don't know how many people would be getting cards or using the app for that either.

SpotHero and Parkmobile tried to solve this. Parking is a weird industry.

It should have been put coins in a slot.

Ehh maybe. I mean, it was a three hour show and I don't carry coins any more. So that would have been ATM -> go to a store and break a twenty -> put in a few bucks -> remember to go out at intermission and put in more money.

Paying by phone is a step up from that old world; I just want it to be one tap, not a whole sequence that tries to upsell me on a monthly pass or establishing an in-app "parking wallet" or whatever.

Not carrying coins is your own fault, not the system's. You can't refuse the analog solutions and then complain the digital ones are too digital.

I guess, but no one carries coins, and the machine doesn't accept them. Me not having coins changed nothing about this situation.

You not having coins is one half of the problem. We can't pretend we don't tolerate the abuses of the digital money system, while not carrying analog money - it's completely hypocritical.

Digital solutions don't have to be abusive.

Where I live the city commissioned its own mobile app for parking, and all numbered parking spots in the city use that app.

There are private lots that use Honk or Robbins or whatever, but the municipal lots and all parallel parking spaces downtown all use the same single app and the revenue goes to the city.

The city parking app works reasonably well, no ads, it just does one thing. If you leave early you open the app and hit "stop parking" and it only charges you the 37 cents or whatever that you actually consumed. It sends you a push notification when your parking is about to expire. And if you don't like the app for whatever reason, you can still pay with a card at the pay machines on every block. It's unglamorous, but it's fantastic technology.

That's still one more app, that's not any better if the problem is needing an app.

See my edits. You don't need the app but the experience is strictly better with it. One of the rare cases where the app is value add.

That seems reasonable. The kiosk is still there to pay with cards or cash directly, but the app/website lets you skip that, avoid printing a slip, maybe buy a pass or something.

The risk is mainly that down the road someone looks at the usage numbers and goes hmm, well the kiosk is only getting used 5% of the time, let's just discontinue supporting it.

The other risk is that they make it cheaper via the app/website, maybe by offering a pass or something. Then that's effectively discrimination against people who don't have a big tech phone.

Or use your card on the machine. We had that for a while, but then these stupid parking companies started to get traction.

Yes, just a plain tap-to-pay on the meter itself (or a nearby kiosk) is the obvious solution. I think doing it on the meter is awkward because then they all need to be online, so you're either dealing with individual M2M cards or some kind of local mesh network, not to mention powering them all. The kiosk is another thing to have to install and maintain and power. And doing a plain tap would have no way of inputting how long you wanted to pay for.

All that to say, I can fully understand how we ended up with "here's a sticker with a number on it, pay on your phone"; it's just, the pay on your phone option should be a one step apple/google pay webpage where you at most have to enter your license plate, and it certainly should not be collecting credit card details within the app.

And what if I don't use Apple Pay or Google Pay?

Enter a credit/debit card number then. They are under zero obligation to allow you a cash payment method.

Well they should be. The government should be obligated to support the use of government services without any third-party megacorp dependencies.

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