Pay and dismay: the nightmare of ‘smart’ parking apps

In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the ‘wilfully unhelpful’ ticket machines in car parks: ‘You go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn’t make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions before committing himself and then tries to insert his money through the ticket slot. The remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally – mark this, intentionally – designed to flood your life with unhappiness.’

Almost three decades later, you’d be lucky to find a parking meter at all. Pay-and-display machines across Britain are disappearing in favour of cashless ‘smart’ parking using mobile phone apps. It was reported this month that more than two million drivers will soon live in ‘parking meter deserts’ where the only way to pay for parking is via a smartphone.