sitting in my car in a Seattle parking lot. there's a knock on my window. it's an old lady, who asks me "how do we pay for parking?"
Generally the secret that I can not convey to "the tech stupid" is you're not dumb it is bad. IT IS VERY BAD. I'm just more hardened to it. But like when it comes to phone stuff I am on my back feet. So this kinda fills me with dread
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.
I distinctly remember telling my parents that's exactly the kind of job I wanted.
My first job was like this sometimes. A cashier at an automatic car wash. At night I'd be the only person in the building and there wouldn't be many customers, so I was getting paid to read, watch anime, and play music.
On the other hand, I sometimes had to stay half an hour past closing time to finish cleaning after some idiot decided to go through at the last possible moment with an entire landfill in their uncovered truck bed, so. (I wasn't paid for that time either and was too young and naive to realize that was wrong)
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?
parking lots are low margin because they're waiting on the land around them to get more developed so they can build on the lot
it's really funny because it kills parking downtown every time
this parking lot is inside a building! it's on the ground floor, sandwiched between the below-ground parking for residents and the apartments themselves. if nothing else, there should already be people at the building during all of its operating hours and one of them could just be assigned to clean out the cash box and ticket people for not paying.
yeah. the good news is no one's watching so you could hit a few support pillars with a uhaul if you wanted
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:
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). 🤞
The app pings you at the ten minute mark to extend your parking time, which is exactly the kind of thing that sells shit like this. Like, I'm glad the apps exist! I have extended my parking four times in one day without having to go back to the car, and that's great. I've also done wacky shit like parked, gone up to my office, transferred money around at my bank, and only then paid for my parking, since you don't actually need to be at the lot at all to do it. They didn't intend for me to do that, but nonetheless. The problem is just that these fringe benefits are not worth the pain and complexity.
In an ideal world there would literally be One, Simple App that just hooked into APIs all the parking companies operated, at no cost to the parking companies. Like those unified package tracking apps but for paying parking. Would have every functionality one could want. You look up the provider or just type in a unique ID for every lot in the nation. Would be so nice.
Too nice. God knows nothing like that will ever happen.
True to this; at most there should be a QR code sticker on a standard collection booth.
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
A year or so ago I parked outside of Kafe Kerouac and discovered the meters outside were changed for an absurd app that cost twice as much
So I just parked at the CVS and walked over instead
God help you if you want to do something in the city and don't have a smartphone I guess!
Don't be silly. Everyone has a phone, and phones are famously 100% reliable. They never run out of power or just randomly stop working.
I watched this woman's phone download 35 megs of ???? in order to pay to park and i just thought. what if her data plan was shut off. what if reception was fucked due to weather and she was getting 144kbit service. she'd be standing there for longer than she was even trying to park just trying to get the program, with zero alternatives
I like to use classic video games as a metric.
Super Mario Bros: 40KB
Super Mario World: 512KB
Super Mario 64: 8MB
Ocarina of Time: 32MB
If your parking app needs more storage than a AAA 3D dungeon crawling adventure game, you're doing something horribly wrong. (Of course much of the blame lies with the OS/SDK, since even a simple "hello world" app is a damn megabyte)
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
a loooooot of connecticut ones, random boston-area ones, and when I was there, Portland, Maine
the combination of financial crisis and privatizers getting mindshare means that there was a lot of raiding over here, convinced by how much technology would fix metering. AIUI the city gets the parking violation ticket income, but not the parking income, but that may have changed since I asked city council about it a few years ago
sacramento as well, and agreed with nire; municipalities are incentivized to police parking more because that's where the city money is.
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.
yeah I hate that we have to turn on their fucking clown service bullshit just to read a QR code, but, nonetheless, it is there, and definitely a better option
unfortunately the 'a googler did this in their 20% time and released it under their team' barcode scanner that was very Android 4 stopped being updated for new devices in 2019 or I'd recommend that one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.zxing.client.android&hl=en_US&gl=US
tho Google Lens will do it
ZXing was good but for modern apps I love Scandit. Does QR, 1D retail, 1D industrial, 2D industrial, etc. Great for scanning serial number on incoming junk at work for example. You can google the numbers directly from the app, or if it's a URL it will show it to you without going there so you can get a bit of a vibe whether it's safe to visit or not. Good for tracking numbers too. Scan directly from the shipping label, copy and paste to the client, be assured there are no errors. I use it a lot.
the big reason ZXing was what I recommended people was that of all of them it had the least tracking permissions for a QR app because it was someone's side project who was already pretty well paid
I've always used Binary Eye, which is open-source and availible on F-Droid:
https://github.com/markusfisch/BinaryEye
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
It horrifies me when I see public transit systems go over to low quality apps for fare collection or a card that's not available on board the buses, no, you have to go to one specific customer service office that's downtown but not at the hub where half the bus routes intersect, or it's available only at one kiosk in one train station that's only open Monday through Friday 10 am-3 pm. Screw it, this is just a far better argument for free public transit as most of its costs are already being paid through sales and property taxes
Or, if free public transit is Too Socialist, what would be so hard about just having a credit card reader in the bus/train? I get on and swipe, I get off and swipe, and the two locations/timestamps get collated and I'm charged whatever appropriate price. But no, no, let's have entirely custom infrastructure -_-)
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
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?
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
