joe m 🐀

I remember my parents parking at some lot in some Michigan town in the mid 2000's. Parking lot was manned by a booth with a guy sitting in it playing Oblivion on the 360 who looked up, silently took 3 bucks with a smile, and went back to playing. I wonder what that lot's like now.

my mom came over to my place earlier this year to help me on a big project, and the nearest public parking is in a building next to a local bank. the signage notes that during the week, during bank hours, the parking is for bank customers only, but it was a saturday at about 11:30 AM. after having to install one of the multiple dumb parking apps, we noticed that the lot wasn't even listed in the list of nearby lots, then manually punched in the lot ID number to be confronted with a screen saying that the lot doesn't open until noon (news to us) and they don't accept advance payment. we ended up having to go into the bank and make sure that they wouldn't have us towed in the next half hour, then set a reminder for noon to pay up for the rest of the day.

stupid fucking system, and to save what, like $80 a day on parking attendants? $100?

god this is all infuriating

Jesus christ on earth

Jesus Christ. I'm glad I could still just take a ticket from a dispenser and swipe my card to leave when I had to park in Manhattan.

Love too pass along services to a company that's incentivized to:

• take payment for parking but
• put in the minimum viable effort on making the app because
• if you screw up you'll also have to pay them more in penalties and fines

I'm glad people like you exist, that have enough time to help people out with that kind of absurd nonsense. That's the real heroism of our era.

I just hope the 1 hour wound up being enough (or that the system was lenient enough to not notice if she went overtime). 🤞

They removed most of the parking meters in columbus a few years ago for various apps. Feels like a genuine crime that you can't just pay the fucking city to park. You have to download an app, put in your license plate, etc etc and no cash allowed. Guess you're fucked if you don't have a phone, or it's dead, or you don't have a debit card, or you're in a rush, or

God help you if you want to do something in the city and don't have a smartphone I guess!

the worst part about these apps is usually none of the money goes to the city, even for street parking, outside of big cities because every municipality sold off their parking spaces in the 2000s

Somehow my OnePlus' built in camera app doesn't QR support, so I've used what sounds like the same or a very similar QR reader app. The UI is a god damn nightmare that I have to look at for a good 5 seconds before finding the place to actually open the correct link (the huge "open" button in the middle of the screen is actually for the ad).

Thanks to this post I did finally figure out activating Google Lens through the default camera will recognize QR codes.

modern technology:isaacGui

It's great because if you'd rather take public transit KCM can't run their buses at all lately and ST has the tunnel single tracking so if you need to go anywhere in a timely manner I guess you should just buy a car huh? No I don't know where you'd park it but who cares look at shiny new car ooo economy number go up

I do actually prefer the separate reader app than Camera, though. I'd rather not have my camera doing anything.

I'm posting a counter-experience, not to disagree with you, but to give hope. It's possible for things to be better, because sometimes things are better. Sometimes.

There is one parking app in Pittsburgh. Just the one. Street parking, empty lots, multi-story garages, empty grass fields. All of them are ParkMobile. The only exception is when the parking lot is a gravel field eight blocks away from the monster truck rally, which doesn't have an app at all, it has a dude with a rubber-banded stack of bills.

And, critically, there are pay stations. Again, street parking, lot, garage, whatever. Every quarter-block, big chunky physical thing the size of a payphone. On the side are app instructions and zone number, on the front is a standard-ass monochrome kiosk interface that takes cash and card.

I have repeatedly seen senior citizens from out of town figure out the pay station in a few minutes, which ain't great but it ain't terrible. The biggest source of confusion is from people expecting a physical receipt to put on the dash.

I suspect the main reason it works that way here is because most surface lots and garages are actually operated by the local government, and it's the same department that's in charge of street parking. There's probably a directive somewhere that says every parking spot must have a physical pay station within 50 feet, and it actually happens. I'm sure there's a lesson here.

Both times my card has been skimmed have been during two separate trips to Seattle, before I moved here, and I strongly suspect both times were from when I would pay for my friend's parking in the city because as a simple midwesterner I was shocked and appalled at how much they wanted to charge by the hour. They hadn't all transitioned over to apps yet, these were all little self-serve kiosks, but the whole time I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being fleeced somehow.

It's been bad, it's getting worse, it will become worse.

They’re slowly starting to get rid of more and more good ol’ coin meters in downtown Olympia for smartphone payments only and man it sucks. Cant just push the button to get a free 15 minutes for a quick stop on certain streets anymore AND it’s more expensive than the coins

With the location permissions, there are some apps you want to select "At all times", but I get what you're getting at. It's sad for people who don't understand how the things work. It's also a sort of example of companies trying to give you more choices for privacy (asking how much location data you want to give an app), but overall just making it more confusing for the end user.

Where I worked, we were doing trade for some, what we thought, were gift certificates to a local car wash. We were then going to sell off the gift certificates. Well, sort of luckily, I bought one first and realized it's not a gift certificate. It's for money off a monthly subscription to the car wash. You need to download an app to use it. In fairness to the Car Wash, you can unsubscribe immediately, so you're not actually locked in for forever after putting in the "gift certificate". But I brought it up to my boss because like... for someone who doesn't know better, they just simply wouldn't know how to use the card, or it would've been declined at the car wash itself, since you have to redeem it through the app. We ended up not selling any of the certificates because we didn't want people to get confused and/or have to walk people through it.

On one hand, I personally like the unlimited subscription to a car wash. However, it struck me as so odd they have no other way to give you a gift certificate. You can pay with cash/ card when you're at the car wash, so you don't need the app. But if you want a gift certificate? Need the app. Just odd to me

I feel every digital service needs an analog option.

My family were on Vacation in LA back in 2019 and we needed to wash some clothes. The Apartment had no washer or a place inside to wash clothes (at least we didn't have access to it), so we had to go to a nearby laundry mat. The laundry mat didn't accept cash or credit/debit, you had to purchase a proprietary card, then put money into that card to use the washer. So we ended up spending a lot more on cleaning clothes because of the cost of the card, which we immediately discarded since we only needed it once. I seriously don't understand why they don't use a card and QR reader along side the cash/coin slots. It's because money, of course.

Also I never had a phone that came with a QR code until recently. My Mom's Galaxy S5 didn't have one my LG Phone from 2016-17 didn't have one, and my Pixel 4a installed with CalyxOS didn't have one either, up until a couple months ago where they replaced the camera app that actually had a QR code reader. QR codes have been a standard for years, so why did it take so long for the readers to come on the phone by default?

I really hate this.

My apartment building swapped over from passes you put on your dash to some stupid app for the visitor parking, which is the most agonizing experience to use in practice. The garage doesn't even have wifi and cell reception is usually a bust because it's underground concrete so i have to futilely attempt to load their dumb webapp for ten minutes before i even am able to enter my girlfriend's information, every single time

Dude it is absolute hell trying to use those stupid things. The last one charged me five times.

at that point i would not even pay for parking. how do you expect older folks to figure out this convoluted shit if younger generations can barely get it to work

lol yep. i was in a more urban part of seattle and trying to park somewhere and it was only slightly less of a nightmare. same deal with the bullshit fake apps, the payment options that didn't work, things just not functioning the way they should. it's hell.

This is the shit that genuinely makes me want to quit software. What is the point if technology doesn’t improve people’s lives? What is the point if we don’t apply technology judiciously to a problem and consider the needs, background and capabilities of everyone who might use it? The amount of effort expended on things that make people’s lives worse is astounding. I might as well punch somebody in the face, at least it’s cheaper!

I've worked in IT for my entire adult life and if even I get frustrated by these apps, I can't imagine what non-technical people have to go through.

One time I had so much trouble getting Parkmobile to work I just gave up and risked a parking ticket. I didn't get one, so ended up saving a few dollars.

And it's frustrating because this stuff doesn't have to be so hard. Why does Apple Pay work in some parking locations but not others? Why does the app forget you saved payment info? Why does one credit card that otherwise works fine get declined while another one works?

It's sheer insanity, and it doesn't have to be. You're awesome for helping that lady. She reminds me of my mom, who also struggled with this stuff.

Because everything seems designed to scam people out of money that nobody actually wants to pay anyone

throughout all this we had to grant Location permissions at least three times, and each time you have to decide between three options, none of which are "Yes."

this fucks me up way too often. i get that a "Yes" / "Only this time" prompt would've been way less explicit as to what actually happens but some apps are broken (hello Starlink) and just keep asking you over and over and over and ove

and it fucks me up every single time like which one am i supposed to choose

i love computers (i hate computers)

this is why i don't charge the elderly for technical support. as the commons are captured by private ownership, we are subjected to endless competition over which company is dominant.

sending this post to a city council member in my hometown as he looks into changing a permit-parking lot into a QR code lot

https://ia601806.us.archive.org/12/items/america-against-america/America%20Against%20America.pdf

This has been going on for decades now. Keep humans from ever being able to speak to other humans; funnel them into a one-size-fits-all set of unsatisfactory options and hope they give up and go away.

I'm currently taking a class on Education Technology and the way technology can control people is so obvious to me, but it's just ignored by the rest of the class, professor included.

As a teacher: kids don't have the computer literacy people think they have. Outside of using apps, computers are baffling to them. They are roped into using really garbage tech in schools.

The way tech literacy is taught is through breadth, never depth. Ideologically it is dangerous to let the youth learn and master computer literacy. It is much much easier to control them if they have, at best, a cursory understanding of a thousand apps than if they have mastery over a few.

All of this comes with an uncritical technological fetish.