Modern parking lots always seem ripe for physical phishing, whats stopping someone from sticking up a couple of QR codes that link to a fraudulent payment page or some other malware?
This is one of those things that tech really didn't "fix" and now I have to select from one of 20 apps instead of just paying with cash or even a credit card.
I have, on multiple occasions (in Austin, >10 years ago), paid for parking to an "attendant" at a lot I know is free. Those guys will just have your car towed — the whole scam just hangs together: the towing company charges you for the storage & processing, but not the nominal fee; the attendant gets cash. Win-win-lose.
I'm from a developing country with humongous corruption. I now live in Canada and love it. But to certain degree corruption is just less visible. For example, apparently majority of our towing industry in Toronto is just organized crime. With murders and arson and everything - in the seemingly simple and innocuous towing industry. And when opening a restaurant in downtown, near one of the stadiums, protection money is just normal line item.
Similar experience here, and from your name we’re either neighbors or from the same country originally. People from our region usually have some idealized fantasy about western countries. After I moved to the US I was shocked to find out that it is just as corrupt as the Balkans, just in a different way.
My pet peeve is hearing how I don’t understand corruption because I live in a functioning country now.
To be fair, it IS different, and I think Canadians cannot fathom the concept of taking a bottle of booze / carton of cigarettes / box of chocolate with you for normal bureaucratic activities. Similarly, it took me a while to understand where Canadian corruption lies and I'm sure I only understand and am aware of tiny percentage - I happily live a straight and narrow, middle class, ignorant kind of life. As such I'm only sure there's many other types of corruption in other places I'm blissfully ignorant of :-:
> majority of our towing industry in Toronto is just organized crime
All industries who's generous profits depend on monopolizing a fixed pie, they need to tightly control the amount of competition in order to maintain their profits, so they eventually devolve into a maifa-like organization, regardless if they're blue collar or white collar.
The only difference is the blue-collar mafia is way more visible as they solve their difference with valence, while the white-collar mafia doesn't need to resort to barbaric acts but simply lobbies their political friends in power to put enough laws and regulations in place to stop any newcomers entering their turf.
If only the towing industry could have taken a page out of Canada's telcos' book and lobby their way.
"The only difference is the blue-collar mafia is way more visible as they solve their difference with valence, while the white-collar mafia doesn't need to resort to barbaric acts but simply lobbies their political friends in power to put enough laws and regulations in place to stop any newcomers entering their turf."
I remember when I moved to DC many years ago we drove to an art exhibit (in an empty building way away from the metro). There was a guy walking up and down the road saying "$5 to park!" I paid him and in the elevator an older woman smugly told me "It's free to park here!" I told her "I know, I'm paying for him to not break MY window." The look on her face....
In my city, in the rougher parts it used to be somewhat normal to pay someone to "look after your car", of course you were paying them not to vandalise it while you were away! Especially popular on football days when parking near the stadium.
It was only a couple of pounds or so. I haven't been to these parts of town for years so I have no idea if this practice still goes on.
There’s a popular swimming around here that’s near a rough neighborhood. One elderly gentleman from that neighborhood guards the cars at the swimming hole. He even got himself a shirt that says “security”. You pay $2 and he makes sure nobody busts the windows out of your car.
No, I don’t think it’s blackmail in this particular situation. Though that definitely does exist here in other spots. This is just an old guy who tries to quell the riff-raff of the youth of the neighborhood. He’s really sweet actually. And if you bring him a cold beer, he’ll do a quick cleaning of your windows to boot!
I'm aware, and have used, this practice in Oakland, CA, Los Angeles, SF, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle and Portland OR. One reason I keep a small amount of cash around - just for the vig.
Canadianfella is correct. "Vig" is not the correct term. Vig, short for vigorish, is a yiddish/Slavic word used to describe the excessive interest on a loan from a lender of ill-repute. It's also used to describe the house's take of a book.
It's not just money you pay to shady people. If he charged you $5 for parking, but allowed you to pay when you came back, but it would be $10 instead, you could say the additional $5 was the vig as that represents a 100% interest on a short term loan.
This is common all over the developing world. I always give them a little something, despite the feel of extortion it has to it. It’s marginally better than begging, and they will really watch the car, and often help with parking and leaving. Fair enough.
There is often a fine line between crime, commerce and even altruism. It is a shame that western society has been perhaps a little too effective at separating these concepts. The very same contract could be any of them in different contexts:
"Party A pays 1 Pound Sterling for the item owned by Party B"
Crime: Party A blackmails Party B into selling them the item at a discount
Commerce: Party B offers the discount to entice Party A to try the item out, so that they can sell more at full price in the future
Altruism: Party B wants to give the item to a good home rather than destroying it (if that would cost them, then it's even mutually beneficial altruism from both parties)
Clearly it is the context about how the contract was made that distinguishes the situations. It would be a mistake to try to classify every possible contract as legitimate based on its semantics alone.
That happened to me at least a few times; I never went for it, and nothing bad happened in those instances. In retrospect, I suppose I'm surprised. But perhaps it was sort of randomized, so that people wouldn't draw obvious conclusions?
“Fire Mitigation” are not first responders: they’re private entities that listen to the FDNY’s radio frequencies and follow them around. They’re ambulance chasers and that’s always been a scummy domain; it’d be much more surprising (and worse) if FDNY themselves were somehow involved.
Two things. Sometimes these venue areas have other central business district employers who don’t allow overnight or weekend parking for the public, but don’t enforce it. (But they are signed to allow towing) The fake parking guy probably has a relationship with the tow driver.
Also, tow operators are generally pretty shady. Because they operate in a second responder capacity, they have personal relationships with cops and sheriffs, repair garages, etc.
This is a well-known problem at more than just parking lots. Any proprietor using QR codes in their place of business should generally be policing the property for rogue stickers. Obviously, quality of the business matters here a lot for that.
Fix: “using QR codes” is unnecessary. Just every business with public access to the property. Customers of a business not using QR codes are vulnerable to the same scam.
One would think this would happen pretty often, but at least my cursory search didn't turn up many specific examples of it happening in the US. I wonder why that is?
I was a mobile developer on a parking app, and this is a serious issue. Our solution was to add a button in the app to verify if a QR code is valid, but I was always bothered by how tucked away the actual button was.
Radical idea for this century: pay someone to stand at the entrance of the packing area to put cash in a safe or hold a card reader up to the drivers' windows. With some training, this person is also your health and safety officer, your security personnel and even your 'sorry sir/madam we are out of spaces' person (who saves each customer ten minutes of driving in circles).
As a computer programmer, I love it when technology allows us to automate things and do more with our time. But I also love the human connection that being greeted by a service professional offers; I don't mistake it for friendship, but it is valuable to me in its own way.
Socially, these kinds of jobs fill an important hole in contemporary western economics. The lower end of the pay-scale is being squeezed out of existence, gambled away on the slim chance of saving megabucks at scale from automation. Possibly the only downside is the unpleasant behaviour that members of the public might show towards service professionals. However, maybe a culture of mutual respect can be promoted more effectively when companies are not always data-harvesting, corner-cutting and penny-pinching as side-hustles.
Cash in a box with a person at the entry? In Seattle???
That would be a bad business decision - the cash would be stolen daily without consequences and if the person you hired was harmed in the theft, you would be liable as a business.
I don't live in Seattle, so I don't know what it's like there, and nor am I an expert in physical security. However, if it's a social norm to pay for human parking attendants, it's not a stretch to assume that there would be human police officers around too. Ultimately, you can't have people doing some jobs without other people doing supporting jobs, but the same is kind of true for digitalisation too: the reason these parking systems are so disliked is that we don't have a conventional or standard parking charge infrastructure to support it yet.
I'm sure people would be much happier with paying for parking via the internet if it was done with an open, reliable and secure protocol with plenty of easy-to-use implementations. But given how impossibly far that is from the digital systems that are used for parking currently, human parking attendants seem to me to be an attractive option. My original comment was 'radical' when seen from the current standpoint of industries being so 'anti-human' that they won't employ workers even when labour is cheap, the work is humane, and it improves the experience for the customers.
So I've no idea if it would be a good decision for Perfectly Profitable Parking LLC, but I think it would be a good decision for the world :)
I was at Dick's sporting goods and the cleats section was this special "app" area where you could either enter in your search criteria or scan shoes so associates would approach you with the shoes in hand.
The app was slow as f - and only really worked if you brought up and scanned the shoes.
Was there any instruction? No - you had to figure it out yourself. To be honest if felt like you were playing myst.
Why was this done? IDK - to stop shoplifting?
Why was the old way so bad that you had to add all this crap. They're goddamn shoes - put them in boxes and let people try them on like we've been doing for 40 years. Creating an app is not going to improve the experience 10x.
If it's not going to improve the experience 10x - why are you doing this? WTF?
These are the instances where I understand a Steve Jobs type blowing their lid.
… I was also recently at Dick's, and witnesses this same stupidity. Am I supposed to … what, have the attendant haul out pair after pair while I attempt to determine what my size in this brand+model is, or if, like so many shoe stores, they even carry my size? Let alone whether I like the look.
… the best shoe store I even went to, hands down, just had all the boxes laid out in stacks upon stack on the floor, where you could go through them.
… stores should be destroying online purchasing in this category by allowing me to try the damn thing on. If I can't … might as well order online? It's just as much of a gamble. (And sometimes, Amazon retailers provide a size chart with a conversion to mm. Although sometimes they also provide multiple size charts with conflicting information, too.)
(Also, a.) America, can we start measuring shoes in some actual unit, like mm or cm? … that there's a kids system, and women's is just inane. b.) Shoe companies would do well to have a standard sizing. You'd think that would be a thing. And yet, as someone with an odd foot, I can tell you that for some companies, it is, and for some, it isn't. I bought Nike for a while, since it was, and I knew any shoe in my size would fit comfortably. It was a magical few years … until Nike changed something. Why?)
I think that, as a general principle, terms, conditions, privacy policies, and other contracts that part of something incidental to the primary purpose of a service, should be entirely void regardless of whether they are supposedly accepted.
Signing up for school or doing anything effectively required for school? Third-party terms should not be relevant.
Parking? If the parking lot itself has legal terms, okay (whether any such terms should be allowed is a different issue). But the app? No terms should be valid. If the app collects location data, it should be liable, full stop.
Eating at a restaurant? Toast’s terms should not matter.
Even worse, my Dad met us for brunch and overstayed his allotted time in one of these systems by 8 minutes. Would be ok if they billed him the same rate perhaps, but they "fined" him $80 for the "violation". All the while trying to look like the local police as much as possible. All these companies are scam artists.
The whole concept of "allotted time" is a scam anyways. Sure, it made sense with analog pre-paid parking meters, but it's complete nonsense when you are modernizing it like this.
Billing the actual parking time down to the minute is pretty trivial, so having to reserve a specific time means they are intentionally trying to defraud you by either a) making you pay for time you won't use, or b) fining you for not reserving enough time.
Love how when someone overpaid in coins the next one parking there could take advantage of it while now the payment is instead tied to your license plate.
Most of these shitty apps pay over 10 dollars to the payment companies to process a chargeback. And if they get too many their rates increase or they get kicked out.
So chargebacks for bullshit "fines" is a great solution to teach them not to charge those.
they could easily ban you nationwide, at all the parking facilities that payment processor serves. or if their ToS doesn't allow banning, your payments will just start failing their fraud checks, and you'll be effectively banned. if that's an acceptable consequence then go ahead and do a chargeback, but don't recommend it to others who don't know the consequences.
This story makes me sad and a little angry. The bits that stand out for me are:
- The requirement to have a smartphone and mobile data service.
- The requirement to run untrusted code (granting whatever "permissions" it demands) on her personal device.
I think it's important that necessities and other basic services (including parking) remain equally accessible to everyone, not locked away behind expensive, often burdensome, usually exploitative technology products. I don't know if legislation is the best way to keep our society from being pushed toward the latter, but if that's what it takes, I would support it.
Technically there is no requirement for a mobile app or data.
Through PayByPhone you can pay for parking using SMS, by calling (IVR), a web app or mobile apps.
But as the author points out, it's hard for the user to know about all the options.
That's why I'm personally not a fan of cities that allow more than one vendor. How to advertise all of them on sign posts and stickers (sometimes given different location IDs that you need to use with each vendor) without overwhelming the user?
I will one-up this one: the govt obviously enforces the payment and will send your home a ticket if you don'tpay the parking; why not instead, just send the parking fee? Coalesce them into a yearly licensing fee? Rhetorical questions.
I'll add another one, that is an issue when traveling:
- Having an app store account of the country you are visiting.
Some of this apps are geo restricted and can't be downloaded with foreign app store accounts. Sometimes they can't process foreign cards or foreign phone numbers.
While on holiday in the States for the first time recently I actually changed my Play Store country to be able to download some US specific parking app, not knowing that I apparently have to wait a full year before I can change my country again (I don't remember reading this during the process).
Explaining this to Google Play and Google One customer support led to nothing, they just told me to wait out the full year essentially. I'm just stuck with it for now.
I've had to do this before too. Having to create a fresh Google account when visiting another country using a domestic IP address. This because changing billing country in certain platforms means losing purchases or personaliation.
I've chosen a constrained name pool for my hosts and devices, and when I add new ones, I choose the same name but in a different language.
I can just see it now, I go on an international trip and make a trail of Google Accounts for myself, all named the same, but in the local language. Heehee, can't wait!
Agree. It is a serious problem when actual stuff in the world is based on shitty hell software- when the only way to do the stuff in the world is to enter into the shitty hell software world. Then it is exactly living in hell.
These days, everything actual is already based on software. It is miserable. It's nearly impossible to talk to humans these days. Even talking to someone at a hospital or doctor's office is nigh impossible at times. I have also noticed an increase in the automated phone systems and even human representatives just flat out hanging up or ending chats on me, when it is they who are having the problems. But I just get a condescending "call us back when you have the required information". I especially hate when the automated system says "it looks like we're having a problem". No, I'm not having any problem. It's you having the problem.
Just an observation, parking, self checkout, payment terminals, etc are examples where the general public is forced to interact with "enterprise" style software, as in software that's not bought by users and so ignores their needs and prioritizes what business buyers want.
Anyone who works with such software at work (like SAP) knows it's UX is garbage and it's not for them. But now the same model is being foisted on the masses.
Have you been to a Uniqlo lately? Actually good self checkout. You just dump your clothes in a bin and it scans everything. Like black magic compared to typical self checkout systems.
+1 to this. Uniqlo’s checkout app is an amazing app if only for its absolute simplicity and reliability. This is a model for all these apps to aspire to. We can only hope…
Why have parking lots not kept their usual parking payment station things? In France, all paid parking I've seen has both options of an app or just using the parking meter payment thing (with the smartphone option usually being better because you can pay exactly by the minute instead of paying 1 whole hour)
They want to push the cost onto the customer. If they don't have physical infrastructure it's a cost they don't have to maintain anymore. They know we will put up with the app bullshit because we have to park.
This is a great observation. Corporations just keeping pushing costs, infrastructure, features, quality assurance, and even testing onto regular people and customers. We're everybody's little compute engine.
Self-checkout groceries: wow, what an insult that I should have to train myself as a cashier at every store I shop, and further insult that you can't employ deserving humans for it.
Interestingly, the move to place the POS in front of the customer rather than handing our cards to the cashier, is a valiant effort to make things more secure and efficient, I suppose, so I kind of approve of this change, although it sometimes gets crazy to figure out a new POS terminal for myself, and that's the most stress-filled point of shopping when the whole line and the cashier are all waiting for you to pay and checkout and GTFO ASAP.
If done right, self check-out is awesome. When I shop at BJs I arrange everything in my cart with its barcode visible as I shop. Then I go use one of the “10 item or less” checkouts that had a handheld scanner and count my items, then scan them all. Their kiosk supports contactless payments, and I can get through with a full load of groceries way faster than the “trained” cashier this way. And I don’t have to let someone else touch my stuff or put it on a conveyor that everyone else’s stuff has ridden on. Contrast this with the local Publix where there are tons of workers flying around but you end up held hostage by “friendly” aka overly-conversational cashiers half the time, and all your groceries hit the conveyor, the cashier’s hands (which also handle money) and the bagger’s hands (which also touch every cart left in the parking lot). When I shop at there I feel like I need to sanitize my groceries when I get home.
Tell me about it; quarantine and sanitizing groceries became a minor thing in the pandemic. And I still feel like quarantine and inspection is a good idea to prevent introducing pests, although I was shouted down the last time I suggested it.
You still have to put it in the bagging area though. Every machine self checkout I have used waits until the expected weight is added before allowing the next item to be scanned.
Grocery stores in general bother me. I'm not even that old, but since I sacked groceries as a teenager and was actually trained, like no one seems to do today, I actually prefer to sack my own groceries in the regular checkout line. Even extremely basic things like keeping raw meats or chemicals separated away from food is completely lost on 99% of sackers at grocery stores these days. In just 10 to 20 years, we have lost the ability to sack groceries properly. It just makes you wonder what else has fallen by the wayside in the capitalist and consumer race to both the top of profits and bottom of prices.
The self-checkouts are the greatest waste ever. They never work, but most stores have a single, actual checkout line these days. Things literally got worse, no matter how you slice it. The real checkout line is long, and the self-checkout is incapable of being useful for anything other than a couple of items. Even then, it just yells at you every step of the way.
Yeah, I've seen more than a few public parking facilities that got rid of their existing payment terminals (which take credit card, and sometimes cash) in favor of smartphone-based payment.
I struggle to understand what would motivate it, from the perspective of the parking lot owner. I would presume the up-front cost of the old terminals was already paid off. And they certainly are more user-friendly.
Is it that the new smartphone payment providers are taking a smaller fee? That they are easier to switch between if the fees increase? Or what?
The cost for those freestanding systems are usually pretty outrageous.
It’s a market like hotel WiFi. Early on, fancy hotels signed long contracts for shitty WiFi. Remember when you’d pay $10 for some awful WiFi service at the Marriott? Those parking things are the same.
I consulted for an entity that was paying $7.50 for a $25 dip. There’s hundreds of competing smartphone apps… you can even buy a square reader in a trivial scenario and pay 3%. In the government space, stuff like EZPass at airport parking costs $2-5 per transaction!
This is like Apple Pay. Banks wanted to reap the benefit of technology without paying for the hardware. Better yet people are clamoring to pay $800 for the widgets. Like banks other businesses and even government agencies want to take advantage of BYOD. Better yet if the app replaces manual assistance.
Every company wishes they could become a vending machine. Actually, these apps are even better than vending machines since their cost of sales is zero.
And the first rule of vending machines is that user experience doesn’t matter. Who cares if customers’ sodas are getting stuck? Neglect is the business model. What money you lose to bad UX you make up for in volume due to physical presence.
All of that is what it is. But with the erosion of public goods like a public parking lot for critical infrastructure (hospitals) that is what we are left with.
On a personal level, I hate the way all of this busted and unfixable technology is allowed to proliferate. If a refrigerator is broken you send out a repair man to fix it. But if your printer stops connecting to wifi there’s basically nothing you can do.
If you have plenty of spare time in your life you could just park anyway, and dispute in court that there is no physical way to pay, and they can't force everyone to own a phone.
1. Why do I want people to contact me while I'm out? It's almost always spam, and assuming it's not, it's almost always a them problem.
2. If I did want people to contact me, a flip phone would work fine for that.
Without a smart phone with a data plan, it is becoming harder and harder to navigate the world made for advertizers and cellular providers. And these parking companies don't want to make it easy for you to pay for parking. They'd much rather you have a frustrating experience, take the risk of not paying and getting impounded.
People even made plans to meet at a specific time and place before phones were invented. When they left their houses, nobody was able to deliver a letter to them. I'd say it went fine, but honestly, they're all dead now.
I was appalled when my transit system recently introduced mobile fares, and I let them know exactly how I feel, as a designated early tester.
First you gotta install their atrocious little app, which I've always avoided because it was buggy and Google Maps gave the same real-time info in a better interface. So then you purchase some passes. They're QR-based, they're not NFC. Ugh, why?
Then during your entire voyage you'll need to maintain both connectivity and battery life. I hear tell that NFC can even survive a dead phone battery, but not a QR app. I was pissed about the connectivity, because I tend to disable networking while traveling, and I have a 1GiB data plan. Also, it makes for one-handed boarding because they mean it when they say "Have Fare Ready" so I feel like fiddling with my phone onboard is like fishing in my pockets for a pass, but worse, and I've already had passengers complain at me.
Now they're revamping the fare system again, and they're introducing NFC-card-based payments as well as account-based rather than pass-based fares. The punch line is that the mobile app won't be compatible with the card, so you need to choose one or the other, permanently. Guess I know which way I'll go.
You don't, but you are also statistically unlikely to spend money (or, perhaps spend very little) at where ever you're trying to park so everyone concerned would prefer you move along to make room for a paying customer please. :)
I guess if you s/park/live then this is why everyone concerned would rather poor people just get on with it and die already. I mean if you're not going to spend money then please move along and make room for a paying customer.
They email me, or call and leave a message on my answering machine, or sometimes even write me a letter that eventually finds its way to my house. I get the message and answer it when I have time.
In the not so distant past, it was perfectly normal for a person not to be reachable at all times. Today it became a luxury. I choose to indulge in it.
Does make one think how amazing the UI on cash and coins can be.
My city similarly has a city-wide app that runs the parking meters that is chronically bad and clunky. Even has a bug where no matter how long a duration one picks, it only puts 30 minutes parking on, while charging a 20p service charge every time one pays for parking. The only real option is to keep using it every 30 minutes, and paying the extra 20p every time. It’s just shockingly, laughably, horrendously bad badness.
Oh yes, the world is enshittificating at an unbelievable pace. Here's one I have recently had to deal with. Sometime ago I failed my theory driving exam. The computers presented a series of 30 questions, to which you answer true or false. Fast forwarding to a few weeks ago, I found myself for round 2. The computers have all been changed. Shiny IBMs ThinkCentre with a small camera on top. The exam is supposed to start, but it doesn't. After 20 minutes of hearing someone absolutely not understanding why all the computers were blocked they suddenly are ready for its candidates to answer the questions. The little camera on top, why is there? Because if you deviate your eyes from it the quiz gets temporarily blocked until you get lucky once again and allows you to continue. WHY on earth the italian goverment has decided to spend money on this crap instead of buying simple cheap computers with a mighty reliable mouse is beyond my imagination. Ah before I forget, there was also a pinwheel in the corner whose only main purpose was to do facial recognition the same way is done in some airports. This is the enshittified world that we live in today, and it will get much much worse. Can we please stop all this BS?
Italian government and enshittification, name a more iconic duo, I'll wait.
They built (more correctly, paid) for the IO app for it to be the one touch point for interacting with the government, then started cutting off features from it in other apps. Now they want to aggregate everything again on CIE, which not everyone has yet. Then you have local governments (looking at you, Lombardia) which build random apps which technically support SPID (something like state-provided SSO) and CIE (SAME THING) but wrap them through their custom authentication system because what's better than multiple passwords for the same account? Which already has 2FA?
Man, I wonder if they ever use the crap they build.
I don't know everyone else, but this is certainly not how I expected technology to evolve in general. A completely unnecessary over-engineered world. For me no technology has to negatively interfere with what you're supposed to do and more important, there always has to be a human back up alternative. Is infuriating to assume that every single human being is supposed to have a smart phone to pay for parking. I do really feel sorry for the elders the way they are being technologically-excluded.
Proctoring exams is a crazy, messed-up world. It has always been extraordinarily difficult for human teachers and TAs to prevent cheating on tests. And the tech companies have convinced administrators that technology can proctor exams better than an eagle-eyed human, and so they've designed elaborate biometrics and heuristics and ML to determine who the cheatingest students are, and it's a dumpster fire of false positives and bugs and general injustice. And now we've got LLMs!
For this particular case, the camera thing that I mentioned is absolutely pointless, it's doesn't prevent anything, just an annoying thing that forces you to sit in a rigid, uncomfortable and fixed position to answer questions. But besides that, there are always 30 computers in a relatively small room with each computer spaced from other ones, one person watching from a desk and another one always stood up watching for everyone. Is way way more complicated to cheat than to actually prepare yourself to pass it. Before entering you are even scanned with a magnetic detector! Just in case you are wearing an electronic device that will help you to answer a randomized set of questions.
> And the tech companies have convinced administrators that technology can proctor exams better than an eagle-eyed human.
This to me denotes complete ignorance on the persons that are supposed to evaluate the implementation of a particular technology.
I just can't fathom how a business would not care about the loss of revenue from making it THIS hard for the customers to pay.
Is it possible that the parking prices in the city of the author are legally capped and are not reflecting actual demand? This would mean that the parking lot is basically filled every day anyways, and the business doesn't see any ways to increase revenue by improving satisfaction.
they care, but they are victim of shitty app development companies, and in turn they are victims of the Android/iOS development ecosystems
fixing is in progress. just as redesign. just as upgrading to whatever next version, and so on.
but costs have already spiraled out of control, there are a lot of competitors, and all this doesn't make sense, but probably has some VC money in it somewhere.
> the lot has three signs hung up with instructions on how to pay, because every single lot in town supports one to five different competing parking lot apps
Competition sucks when it's a race to the bottom. Those systems usually look like some early 1800s dude's idea of a parking lot system. The technology to make them secure AND nice to use has been there for at least a decade.
Some people say that the common folk now have cheap mass produced gadgets that were previously only available to the wealthy, and some rant about the enshitification (great term whose origin I need to learn more about of) of our society.
I nod along to this piece and yet I don’t want to be so cynical.
the term is coined by Cory Doctorow, pointing out that big ecommerce middlemen, usually platforms have outsized pricing power (because they are in their quasi-oligopoly due to network effects). and as a consequence of the relative business
success of these platfors nowadays "almost everyone" tries to become one, transform their business into something that might become one, try to replicate the shitty business methods
"One way to park anywhere" sounds like a federated system, which is exactly how I think it should work. You could install one of many client apps, but all the parking companies can be paid for from any of them.
What is my incentive as a car-park owner to agree to your federated system when scummy company X has just offered me $1000 to exclusively allow them to collect fees for my car-park?
> Pay-for parking feels like the kind of thing that should become a utility with one, easy, well-known way to pay for parking anywhere.
The trouble is that this either requires government regulation, or for one company to effectively become a monopoly, which can lead to different abuses.
- who should have access to the database linking license plates to addresses?
- what about people with vehicles other countries? Less of a problem in North America, but I recently was in Canada, and saw some vehicles with German number plates!
- what about false number plates? Or misreads? How does one defend against them?
Some parkings here have a terminal where you enter your license plate and pay right before you are about to leave. Time of entry was registered automatically by scanning your plate. Once you’ve paid you got 15 mins to get out of the gate, again controlled by plate scanning.
The airports near me use the toll RFID tags as an option. I wish most pay parking would be able to bill through it as well. It seems to have a low enough rate of false positives.
I vacationed in Norway in July. Have yet to receive any bills from my trips on ferries and highways. My car had Swedish registration plates. I don't know whether to expect any bills any more.
This is actually how New England handles toll roads. (Not parking.)
You have to write a law with it that says "rental car company's can't charge a junk fee of $25/day" or whatever. (Which is roughly what we were charged the last time we accidentally — there wasn't a toll booth! — took a rental through a toll. $25 from the rental car company for a $1 toll. We own an EZ pass now to avoid this very problem.)
We usually do that, specifically to avoid any chance that the rental company might get billed.
(For those unfamiliar, the EZPass is associated with a set of plates. You can register a rental car against your account during the term of your rental, which helps ensure the charges go to the right place, if the EZPass itself fails to register during the drive.)
There used to be systems whereby consumers could get all kinds of services and just have them billed to their phone account. I don't know how broad or widespread this was, but certainly there were pay-per-call services and such. Unfortunately, the scammers ruined this model, because it was far too easy to force or fake consent over a voice telephone line, and many laws and regulations later, I hardly ever hear of this practice at all.
P.S. my parents became the victims of a phone sex line. They had been receiving mysterious hangup calls in the middle of the night on a regular basis. Then my aunt was planning a trip and dialing a lot of airline (800) numbers, and she accidentally dialed (800) + my parents' number, and got an earful, and so thus my parents found out what all the callers were after.
Are you seriously asking this question in 2023? Nobody makes web pages anymore, just make an app and require access to a ton of user data just to sell them for shady purposes.
Parking in Seattle sucks. The last time I was there (10 years ago), I got a parking citation left on my windshield. It said I was in violation of the no parking hours, which I was not (proven with photograph). I had to go to some shady private business to contest it, but was eventually successful.
Last time I parked in a lot that required an app to pay, I just let them put a slip on my car saying I didn't pay and wanted me to pay extra, filed a dispute with the company claiming the app didn't let me register my license plate.
The company then told me my license plate wouldn't register because there were multiple people with that plate number in the lot. They let me pay the regular price online.
There should be a legal requirement on how difficult “paying” for something can be.
Installing an app, entering my name, address and email, and then manually typing in the numbers on my credit card should not be allowed to be called “paying”. That’s more like a members-only club that you must join before you can use their services.
Parking apps are the work of the devil, and the devs and all the people involved in implementing them should be ashamed each and every day they go to work. And I write that from half a globe away from Seattle, in Eastern Europe, that is. At least some of the cities in here still give you the possibility of paying by SMS, for now.
Everything digital nowadays is a liability, not any kind of improvement. That's why I swore I'd never have IoT things at home, even though I myself played with PCBs, ordered PCB manufacturing, and assembled couple devices.
Any IoT and Web pulled upon daily routines is just pain all the way.
I wonder, whether if the internet goes out, modern "advanced" fridge won't unfreeze.
Jokes apart, I walk with my kid in stroller, and to navigate public transit, have to use the awful bus monitoring apps. It's a pain to use even with both hands free and without child to monitor. But 30-yo rich vice-something from the government (that never takes public transit) thinks it's how we must live in the future.
It disgusts me how much duplicated effort there is with services like these. We can debate about the merits of market competition but what are they really competing over? The controlling factor is parking availability, there isn't really anything to innovate about paying for parking fees. The people who choose these apps aren't even really the ones that have to use them the most, because god knows the people that own the parking lot get free parking, and the "markets" for parking lots are not organized such that people who need to park can't really just decide not to park at a particular lot because they realize they use a shitty service to collect fees. This is a huge indicator that these services should be owned by municipal governments and cities should pool their resources on a standard shared platform / software suite instead of duplicating the effort making identical competitors.
Lots of industries like this, frankly. Another one that comes to mind is recruiting. Hundreds of thousands of duplicated man-hours, for what? Are any of them really better than the other? How do you "innovate" in these kinds of industries?
There are a few of these apps that are decent and do work, once you get used to it, they are actually quite convenient.
What I dislike is that since charging is now as simple as putting up a sign. Every single parking can and do charge money, no matter how small, remote or ill-managed it is. Previously only the most heavily used lots in the city center would invest in a machine. Meaning now not only you have more to pay, also that parking company knows your every move.
I also find it surprising. UK has 1 "main" app that just works. Has simple UI, 1-2 features and that's it. Then there is a bit of a tail of 4-5 SMS-only providers, which I never used as you first have to "register", maybe call someone first...
I don't mean, UK consumer software is somehow better, I'm just surprised something as straightforward as a parking app becomes a pinch point.
I've attempted to solve this problem. The whole sector is extremely low trust and adversarial, and to be fair they have good reason to be given rampant fraud and their difficult relationships with landlords. It's definitely solvable, but you've got to be willing to play in atoms and have your own test bed (car parks) to do it right.
I also live in Seattle. On iOS these QR code paylots are actually super simple and kinda nice.
I scan the code. It pops up a website with all the lot information known. I select a number of hours. I specify either a stall number or plate number. Then I pay with Apple Pay.
I have never had to download any kind of app. And definitely never need to grant location permissions.
I have to help my parents with something like this at least once a month. The last one was trying to find a traffic school for my dad to go to. There was no way he could ever figure it out, and even I had trouble with the horrible UI on the website. I decided a year ago not to move more than an hour away from them.
>whats stopping someone from sticking up a couple of QR codes that link to a fraudulent payment page or some other malware?
This will become a huge problem / is already a problem. Whats the right way to solve this? some sort of https like trust relationship for the whole QR code interation?
You scan a QR code, that sends a text message. If you have a saved card, you pay in the text thread by replying 'pay now', if not you get a link to save a new card.
No apps required. Hoping that with enough adoption, it will obviate the need for experiences as bad as this.
Sounds good, and you probably have the best intentions, but right now, that would just make you standard no. 15.
It's quite possible that the third sign on OP's parking lot would have led them to a perfectly user-friendly app with a pleasant and simple payment flow. But with so many apps to choose from and each lot only supporting a random subset of them, it'd be basically luck if you get to use the "good" app, even if there exists one.
You can also imagine a world where you have a single phone number saved. You text it "I'm at XYZ parking lot in ABC city, how do I pay?" and it gives you the easiest possible option.
Definitely standard no. 15, but there's room for something better to win out here right?
One obstacle to this is mentioned on the OP: People might not actually know the street address of the parking lot they are standing in, so you'd have to use some other means of identification, like a lot number or geolocation - however, then you're back to requiring an app...
Not necessarily. "I want to pay for parking" -> "Click this link" -> quick automatic web based geolocation and redirect back to the SMS thread -> done.
Mainly because the message thread is implicitly authenticated, so no additional web login required -- and we want to allow for conversational payments, where you can ask as many questions as you need before committing to pay.
Sure -- phishing is a huge problem, but it's also an argument to never build anything ever, because QR codes, sites, apps, emails, etc. can all easily be cloned and used as a phishing attack vector.
I'm not sure if the term "phishing" even applies here. The scam would be straight up fraudulent credit card billing -that most users wont even notice.
During the processing part, The scammers could very well just overbill the user by saying "Do you agree to $2 for parking?" and then charge the user $50. Then say a "We will hold $50 while the transaction is approved" just like a gas station.
Your service will get all the complaints and the scammer just gets the cash.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea or anything, however there are many bored smart teenagers and many hungry people with sliding ethics.
Hell, an even better scam is to copy your QR code from each unit and then bill the user for $X more as a "convenience fee" ... then auto-submit correctly to your service.
I mean, that might not even be illegal [in the sense that the customer agreed to the fee].
Scanning the QR code makes your device text the company? Or you scan it and enter in your phone number? What if I don’t have a saved card? Still seems just as bamboozling
No way am I giving your startup* my phone number. Maybe you can have a custom-generated, one-use-only email address that I can turn off so you don't spam me. (Your startup may be virtuous, but most startups fail, and then my data becomes an asset that gets sold away in bankruptcy.)
I also hope that your startup has been advised on the very significant TCPA liabilities this approach risks. Even if you do everything right, you're going to face lawsuits saying you don't. I have very mixed feelings about the TCPA, and it does hamper "innovation" in some circumstances, but I am delighted that it carries significant litigation risk for anyone who thinks it's a good idea to send me SMS messages. I. Don't. Want. Them.
In Croatia you can pay via SMS, just send a message to the phone number listed on the machine, you type in your plate number and receive a confirmation. The only caveat is some additional transaction cost over paying via the machine.
Doesn't have to be hugely phishy if you have a saved contact card with a number you trust. That's often safer than some new app or web url that is imitating another.
seattle, of all places, should legislate that software built on public money must be publicly available and open for public contributions (with appropriate vetting ofc).
literal thousands of engineers could do better, but may not, and are instead subjected to the profiteers.
Seattle could try (I don't think it would pass constitutional muster), but that wouldn't help here. The person is describing privately-owned parking lots. Paying for storing your private auto on the public street can still be done by hand at a machine.
In my city, we have the ticket machines and a single app which you can use to pay as well. The instructions for said app are literally on the ticket machines. This system works; tech literate people can use the app, others can use the ticket machine. No one is forced to do capitalism to avoid a parking ticket.
… I think partly this is that Android has lacked a decent QR code scanner (out of the box) for far too long. The hardware has been there forever … but you're forced to choose an app, and thus you have to have the nose to be able to suss crapware from not.
Google Goggles grew the functionality years ago, but even recently it will still deliver Artificial Idiocy level results: I scanned a QR code this year (I think it was?) and the AI thought about it and … told me it was a QR code. "Here are image results from the web of other QR codes!" sigh
So I have a dedicated app for this.
The camera app has grown built in support for them, but the UI is hot garbage. I'm not at all sure how one is supposed to discover it; there's no button for it, no label, nothing to really indicate it. You just point it at a QR code, but it's then pretty terrible at recognizing them, so even if you're doing everything right … you might just get nothing, with no feedback.
So I still have a QR scanner app, as it is far easier to work and more reliable at scanning than the camera app is…
Nobody (iPhone or Android) had QR code scanning built in for ages, which is why QR codes crashed and burned very rapidly like 10-13 years ago before having their random resurgence in the last few years because it was finally feasible with the built in camera/app
I still don't think (in Android; I can't speak for iOS) the built-in app is viable. It only detects in insanely optimal conditions, and non-optimal scans produce no errors or diagnostics to the user: you can very likely be doing everything correct, be aiming the camera in such a manner that there is adequate lighting & pixels to scan a QR code, and get bumpkiss — and further, you'd have no idea the feature even exists … whereas a dedicated app will scan it instantly with the same image, and if you don't get it, you know that the app is capable of it and you probably just need to move closer. (Also, the app I have has a decent viewfinder showing you how much it needs, and it shows visible feedback about what it is finding, even if it can't make a full match.)
This is the direct and deliberate result of small government libertarianism. Even if a private parking app is used it should be procured by local government according to a set of accessibility criteria, not left to competing private sector organisations. Parking is a natural monopoly, it’s an area where consumers do not want choice, and should be supplied as a public good, just like public transport and health and education.
Much of the value in "tech" is basically treating people like shit at scale. In this example, when a lot attendant was needed, they could only be so unhelpful. Now we don't need to pay them, can push their work onto customers, and simply magically drop any "problem" customers. Same with all this shit. Huge companies exist solely to prevent a human from getting human support, and many more extend the concept to "scale" without properly supporting customers.
Actually as a consumer I prefer self check out. I am much quicker and it is more efficient because now you can have many of these tills in the same area that only a few would have fit, resulting in much faster experience than waiting in queues.
That experience aside, I don't believe there should be jobs where you simply don't think. Manual labour jobs are unfair because they don't reward the brain whatsoever, no creativity, no one loves to do them, and they create a market of labourers with little to no transferable skills thus putting them in an unfair situation if they want or are forced to get a different job.
You are much faster than a professional cashier? Congrats I guess.
Also the space argument doesn't hold up. The cash register belts are not need on staffed registers if they are not needed on customer slaving ones. So they are approximately the same size minus the chair for one helpful human.
Not because of anything impressive other than the fact that most professional cashiers I have interacted with are not skilled enough to be as fast you imply because it is a high turnover job.
The space argument depends on the fact that all customers are checking out simultaneously, not waiting in a queue.
I read the original with interest because it describes very well the absurdly crap systems the world has become infested with and which many of us on this site have become complicit in making.
People are spending vast amounts of time fiddling with shit that doesn't work.
We not only have created a complex society on all levels, but now a very difficult world to live, even the most simple events is now a pain in the ass.
From restaurants to small markets, you now pay for a robot, you don't have a human to support you.
things that were simple, became full of friction, all to collect our data.
> things that were simple, became full of friction, all to collect our data.
I always wonder who comes up with these full of friction "tech innovations".
Last time it took me about five minutes to order a soda from one of those machines in a hotel. It even required a phone number to complete the order.
Another day that machine failed mid transaction but charged my card so I had to email the hotel's accounting department to get a refund about a week later.
>> It even required a phone number to complete the order.
Omg. This is so stupid.
The same with parties/festivals: you have to create accounts to buy a fucking ticket, then you pay a "convenience fee".
That is, in addition to providing your data to a platform that you did not ask for, you still pay for the "convenience" lol.
So finally when you arrive at the party, then you have to pay for a "credit card" that works only in that place, where some 3rd party collect your data again.
The tone of your oversimplification sounds like you have something against the author's opinion, which, if true, would be much better stated than sarcastically implied.
Edit: The parent has been edited since I commented.
Looks like it's been edited a bit, but when I first read it I got the impression you thought it was long and overly complicated and made a simple boring point. I'm not the only one who observed this, because the comment I replied to said the same thing.
Sort of, if you skip the Google Ads, Google Instant Apps, Google Pay, and Google Location Services problems, which are all one company trying to collect data to use to serve ads.
The other day I just wanted to update a dependency in my Python project and now it’s crashing in CI (doesnt locally) due to a missing C header file. No amount of git clean allowed me to reproduce it locally (using venvs). It used to work fine before. I just gave up for now. The article summarises my feelings perfectly.
The parking companies are the worst kind of parasitic leeches out there. I had a similar experience when travelling to Denmark (I live in Norway). The sign said that you can pay with ParkLink, which I happened to have installed. I opened it, but no parking shows up nearby, and the parking code was not valid either. Turns out you have to have the Danish ParkLink app installed. Well of course! Also, pro tip, if you use Android, use ADB to dig out logs of these apps. I had to do it with EasyPark once because I told them the service was down, and they insisted otherwise. But the app logs showed that it in fact was unavailable for a period... Where is the dignity in these companies?
If you have enough cash the easy solution is to never pay and just accept the fines. One of my colleagues did this for a few years in Amsterdam. We all thought he was crazy, but his total in parking fines was lower than the total most of us paid to Park Mobile in the same timeframe...
A 6 minute video weighting at about 150MiB for "explaining" what can be summarized in a couple sentences of text is another particular version of hell.
Half as Interesting could alternatively be titled Double as Long. Most of the extra length is taken up with in-jokes and the obligatory streaming service advertisement, but you could try the browser plugin 'SponsorBlock' to cut the length back down.
I have questions about where you live if 150 MB of data is an even remotely significant amount of data... Are you on a cellphone in rural Canada or something?
I close the YouTube app anytime it makes me watch more than a 5 seconds skippable ad. This was one of those times so I have no idea what was in the video :-)
In other words: Fuck Google and their ad bullshit.
Raising the question: why do you have the Youtube app installed at all? Modern phones can play Youtube in the browser just fine, and browsers like Vivaldi come with adblock built in.
It's about the Chicago Parking deal in 2008 with some machines for parking. Daley gave control of parking meters to a private company until 2083. Sold out his citizens. For a super discount. And now, in a shocking twist, the private company is squeezing the citizens
and government.
I'm not going to stick up for the deal itself, but parking in Chicago got better after that deal, and downtown parking in Chicago is cheaper by far than NYC, and than Boston. It's about as expensive as Seattle is.
Street parking, a universal hassle, is especially problematic in Chicago due to the infamous Chicago parking meter deal. This deal permitted a private company to take control and revenue from all 36,000 of the city's parking meters. In return, the city received a lump sum of $1.16 billion. However, this arrangement has led to numerous financial and political challenges that won't conclude until 2083.
The root of this decision can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis when Chicago was grappling with a significant budget deficit. Mayor Richard M. Daley, in an attempt to address this, chose to privatize the parking meters without adequate analysis. Surprisingly, the city's aldermen approved this deal by a vote of 40 to 5, despite having limited time to review the terms. These aldermen have since faced criticism for their apparent lack of due diligence.
The beneficiaries of this deal, Chicago Parking Meters LLC (a consortium formed by Morgan Stanley, Allianz Capital partners, and The Sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi) saw immense profits. This was largely due to stipulations in the agreement that increased parking rates, ensuring a steady rise in revenue. Furthermore, the city now finds itself in a position where it has to pay penalties whenever it undertakes any actions that could potentially dip into the company's profits. This has amounted to Chicago paying the company over $75 million since the deal's inception.
Additionally, this arrangement severely restricts the city's urban development endeavors. For instance, adding bike lanes or implementing other urban reforms now comes with the caveat of compensating the company for any possible lost revenues. An attempt to challenge this by claiming the company held an illegal monopoly was dismissed in court twice. The courts deemed that while the deal might not have been the wisest choice, it wasn't illegal. So, due to the financial pressures of the crisis, Chicago ended up making a deal that has permitted financial institutions to reap substantial profits from city property for an extended period.
This is where the sovereignty of the people is so important. A country (or in this case, a city) should not be able to enter into a deal which it is unable to back out from. To actually prematurely terminate a public-private contract would be of course very damaging to the reputation of the city/state/country's reputation, and thus would increase the remuneration private companies expect from running public services due to the additional risk, but would be beneficial to each citizen in the long-term if done with caution.
I. Hate. Technology. I hate working in this field. I hate how unprofessional every company is, from the largest to the smallest. I hate how incompetent all the engineers are. I hate how no business I have ever worked for has ever trained its workers on anything but how to fill out a time sheet. I hate all the blog posts about inane technical details. I hate how people start building a solution to a problem they're not familiar with. I hate how seemingly obvious and painful problems never get solved, because nobody has ever forced the entire product team to listen to a brand new user's feedback. I hate how this affects everything, so the problems just build and build and everything just gets worse and worse.
What specifically should I have said to change it from fulminating to a declaration of the inherent problems in the technology industry that causes the concerns listed in the article (and nearly everyone else's comments) ? Should I just have said "I dislike very strongly ..." ?
One important aspect of this is repetition. If a comment is repeating something that has been said many times before, its curiosity value approaches zero—and indignation makes that happen faster.
Conversely, the more new information or unexpected twists a comment contains, the better it is for curiosity.
Today, I literally spent 10 minutes downloading, installing, creating an account, and adding payment methods to an app so I could pay $0.40 to park for 30 minutes because the meter didn't have a coin slot and the credit card reader was broken.
I was going to a local store to buy something. Amazon will probably get my business next time.
Worst are the apps that force you to “charge” a card with some ridiculous minimum even if you only ever would be in that city once.
Who is going to track my balance 5 years from now when a different company is granted the rights to collect parking for the city?
I’m guessing there has to be a hidden option to only “charge” the app for what you want to reserve the spot for, else this seems illegal, but then again the city may be giving itself these mob-style rights.
While I prefer to shop local for as much as possible, if I'm given the choice between fighting this town's terrible parking regulations and implementation or buying online, the latter is going to win.
If we have good public transit, people can just walk and not have to worry about parking, and the space that's formerly for parking cars can be used for something else.
Semi-related, there's a somewhat established YC company whose entire business is facilitating smartphone gig app usage for seniors who call in for help.
Oh jeez. This is a semi-decent idea for a company so not sure of the need for downvotes…but at the same time it’s a bit “we put a Service as a Service in your Service as a Service leveraged on Software as a Service!”
> I. Hate. Technology. I hate working in this field.
Periodically I joke around with my family that when I retire (I'm 49 now, so it's not all that far away), I'm never touching another computer again. Ever. Each time I make that joke, it's a little less joke and a little more of an actual plan.
In the book "soul of a new machine", one of the engineers burns out.
> He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
I’m sorry to say but you guys haven’t had a single hard day in your life if computers and technology are this traumatic to you. You would crumble under the weight of life just a hundred years ago.
You are an artist with a blank canvas that countless people in the world will pay you life changing amounts of money to draw on. If you choose to paint in a way that you hate, that’s on you.
Humans are quick at adapting. Saying that our specie has been living in absolute terror for the past millenniums and that we somehow solved it in our century is pretty arrogant.
Yes, I do that one. I work with small team that is excited about the space. Each team member has opportunity (and obligation) to interact with clients. The relationships are great. The money is less than at $BigCo but still above median for the area. Actively working against enshittification -- but I still feel it's a futile battle.
> I hate how seemingly obvious and painful problems never get solved, because nobody has ever forced the entire product team to listen to a brand new user's feedback.
Usually in this case the user is not the customer, so it does not matter.
100% completely agree, the only reason I work in this field is because it's both easier and pays significantly more compared to every other job I've had and could potentially ever get.
You're making leaps just for the opportunity to be snide. Attendants aren't the only solution by a long shot, and they are not a bullshit job absent other systems. You are criticizing the image of a person, not a specific person.
In the Netherlands and Germany at least I have never dealt with a parking lot attendant. There's just a machine you walk to, put your card/cash/whatever in, and you get a paper that you put in your car. The whole process takes 1 minute, the things have accessibility features to some degree, and if they don't work there's another one somewhere or its free.
Same experience. But in the US everything seems 99% anti-consumer while the majority of consumers keep supporting/voting for these things.
Not just parking, also banking ($ 30 overdraft fee mentioned in the article), telecom, health insurance. All of it is designed in very anti-consumer ways in the US, even though consumers should be a majority of the votes in a democracy.
The problem is some people were 50 years old when the the 2nd statement became true. For nearly everyone alive, the first statement has always been true. I think the government is failing its citizens by assuming digital literacy is commonplace.
The literacy rate for all males and females that are at least 15 years old is 86.3%. Males aged 15 and over have a literacy rate of 90%, while females lag only slightly behind at 82.7%.
>The literacy rate for all males and females that are at least 15 years old is 86.3%. Males aged 15 and over have a literacy rate of 90%, while females lag only slightly behind at 82.7%. However, massive country-to-country differences exist. Developed nations almost always have an adult literacy rate of 96% or better.
What is the average literacy rate among drivers? Considering that street signs exist, I would imagine almost all countries require a basic ability to read as a pre-requisite for a licence.
The described landscape is hellish for the tech savvy, too. Just slightly less so. Regardless, why disparage non-tech-savvy people? That's most people.
I support this statement! I'm a reasonably tech-savvy iOS user, and these parking apps are among the worst digital experiences I have ever encountered. And I say that as a frequent SAP Concur user
Or for actual computer users who want to avoid Android like the plague it is (also iOS).
Between this (I've basically given up parking on the streets ever again, I'm now forced to always go for actual parkings) and banks, it is indeed hell.
This is one of those things that tech really didn't "fix" and now I have to select from one of 20 apps instead of just paying with cash or even a credit card.