Paying car parks by phone/app

[raybarrow]

Hi Folks,

I like the security of a piece of paper on the dash/winscreen/etc. but moving with the times, how reliable is using the phone to pay? I remember friends complaining, in the early days, of getting a ticket even thought they had paid by phone. I clear my phone out regularly of calls and texts but that could be a bad idea if using pay by phone car parking. Would my 'ancient' iPhone 6 be able to cope, it can't cope with the NHS track & trace software.

Is it another case of non-universality that we seem to specialise in at the moment and you need half a dozen apps, like electric car charging points. (No I don't have one of those.)

Cheer,
Ray.

[swill453]

Would my 'ancient' iPhone 6 be able to cope

Usually you can pay with an actual phone call, so any old phone will do.

With Ringgo you can certainly do that, rather than use their app.

I use it infrequently, but never had a problem with it.

Scott.

[bungeejumper]

Grrrr, I hate them, I hate them. Not just because there are a dozen different providers, and you have to have downloaded the exact company app for whichever parking bay you happen to be parked in. I've got four such apps on my phone, and I'll be certain to need a fifth the next time I'm in some unfamiliar location. Probably trying to catch a train, with my luck.

Ferfeckssake, why haven't we got a single national app that can collect the cash and then distribute it to whichever happens to be the company in charge of that particular car park? After all, it's got a unique identifier number, so there should be little enough scope for confusion?

But then, the whole process is unnecessarily complicated anyway. Our biggest local hospital has maybe eight paypoints, of which five won't be accepting cash on any given day because of various mechanical breakdowns. Of course, you can always go home and pay by 'tinterweb - as long as you don't forget - but the last time I tried that, I ran into a problem and had to call the helpline number. Which turned out to be in America!

Still, apart from being expensive, unreliable, erratic, user-unfriendly, tourist-unfriendly, foreigner-unfriendly, threatening, intimidating, and totally geared toward the regular commuters who encounter the same ones every day - not normal people at all, in fact - I suppose they work quite well.

BJ

[airbus330]

Horses for courses! I like the Apps and sure is a massive improvement over standing in someones wee trying to feed 20p's into a vandalized box. And if you are delayed back to the car its easy to extend your time. No sticky residue left on the windscreen either. I admit that having to have 4 apps on the phone is a bit excessive, but once set up and linked to a credit card it seems a doddle to me.
I was using them on an ancient Iphone SE with no issues until recently, so a I6 (same inside as the SE) should have no issues.

[9873210]

My understanding is the iPhone 6 is not supported by the latest ios 14. I have a 5S which has the same condition. A previously loaded app may continue to work, but you might not get updates, the app will probably stop working when it is decided that updates are mandatory, and you may not be able to download some new apps. (The behaviour when downloading apps that do not support IOS 12 is a silent failure, with no message about why they won't install, usually followed by installing some other app that was nearby on the list of apps).

I expect all of this to get worse overtime until I am eventually forced to get a new phone and bigger pockets.

[Bminusrob]

Where I live, most of the car parks usually use either Ringo or JustPark, so I have the two apps on my phone. If you don't know which one to use in a particuar car park, by trying one, it will use the phone's GPS to find your nearest car park. If it is the correct app, go ahead and pay. Otherwise try the other one.
Generally I like them, because as we become more and more cashless, having cash to feed into the machine gets more and more difficult. Otherwise, you can try using a credit card, if the machine supports cards, but I fine these work quite intermittently.
It is very helpful to be able to pay on your phone to extend your parking time, if necessary.
The biggest irritation for me is that sometimes, you pay what you see on the board, but sometimes, they add a fee. There is no notification of this until you come to pay. I did get quite grumpy last week when I used the Ringo app to pay 70p for an hour's parking on Okehampton, but was charged 95p for the privilege.

[raybarrow]

Hi,

My son has no problem with these parking apps. Our local hospital has get a ticket on entry, pay on leaving, cash or card no poblem. It is, of course, in a relatively secure place. Out in more remote areas I can see that system doesn't really work.

Yes my 'ancient' iphone won't accept some apps (haven't tried parking ones yet) noticeably the NHS Track & Trace app. What happened to backwards compatabiliy and i know there will be some technical problem the 'experts' can't overcome or the marketing people don't want them to overcome when there are new phones waiting to be sold.

Ray.

[AF62]

Generally I like them, because as we become more and more cashless, having cash to feed into the machine gets more and more difficult.

Cash? All the car parks (council or not) in my area have been changed to take card payment - contactless or stick your card in.

[bungeejumper]

Cash? All the car parks (council or not) in my area have been changed to take card payment - contactless or stick your card in.

Contactless would work pretty well, I imagine, although I haven't encountered it yet - it would certainly avoid the problem of the card failing because the machine couldn't read the chip. (Another casualty of badly maintained machines, in our area at least.)

I had to leave a note under my windscreen in Bristol last year, because none of the machines on that particular 'beat' were working with any card I had in my wallet. And the phone link wasn't answering my calls! It's just perfect when you're in for a hospital appointment and the damn parking system puts 25 points on your blood pressure.

BJ

[DrFfybes]

Cash? All the car parks (council or not) in my area have been changed to take card payment - contactless or stick your card in.

Contactless would work pretty well, I imagine, although I haven't encountered it yet - it would certainly avoid the problem of the card failing because the machine couldn't read the chip. (Another casualty of badly maintained machines, in our area at least.)

I had to leave a note under my windscreen in Bristol last year, because none of the machines on that particular 'beat' were working with any card I had in my wallet. And the phone link wasn't answering my calls! It's just perfect when you're in for a hospital appointment and the damn parking system puts 25 points on your blood pressure.

BJ

Shropshire use contactless, and charge by the minute, for both cash and contactless (so if you only have a 50p you can pop it in and get 37 minutes or whatever the rate is.)

Devon went app based a few years ago, before discovering that some of the more rural sites had poor signal coverage. The best was Stover park, which had no phone signal in the car park next to the machine, but did if you walked up to the office to complain.

There are different apps because they pay the car park owner to be allowed in (or pay for the charging infrastructure so saving capital costs for councils looking to implement charging) and get a percentage of the payments in return.

Paul

[Arborbridge]

Awful - hate the whole thing. They should be put in Room 101 along with all pay and display car park meters and their inventors. A curse on society. Remember the day when you could park for free in some god-forsaken seaside town in winter? Gone is that simple pleasure of a few minutes glimpse of the sea for nothing because now there's a meter stuck almost everywhere.

I am lucky in that so far I have managed to avoid them, mostly, but encounters are becoming more frequent and bruising. Recently parked in a National Trust car park to join some friends for a walk - which a couple of years ago was free, BTW. My wife had the app on the phone, but the system would not recognise her so presumably it had been updated since last time we had the misfortune to need it. So, I tried which meant phoning the helpline and going around in circles for 25 minutes - all without result. In the end, I just left the car and joined the others on the walk - to make them wait any longer had just become too embarassing.
When I reached home I had an email message about having logged in to the system using Facebook, which was nonsense because I hadn't. As far as I know, no money had been taken, no fine has been imposed, but I wait in dread.

Hate this way of doing things. Pushing coins in was far better and far quicker, and you get the certainty of that piece of paper that proves you are following the rules - and I've never in my life had to stand in someone's wee to do it!

Arb.

[bungeejumper]

Grrrr, I hate them, I hate them. Not just because there are a dozen different providers, and you have to have downloaded the exact company app for whichever parking bay you happen to be parked in. I've got four such apps on my phone, and I'll be certain to need a fifth the next time I'm in some unfamiliar location. Probably trying to catch a train, with my luck.

Okay, I was asking for trouble I suppose. So yesterday I drove into Bath for the first time since November, and pulled into the Avon Street car park, which is where a lot of the tourists turn up. And it had gone over to (a) pound coins (the machines were rejecting everything else) or (b) pay by phone.

For which it seemed I needed a download from parking.bathnes.gov.uk, for something called a mipermit. For which I'd need to register and have a login. But first I'd need to send a text to them so that they could call me back and give me permissionto download the damn app. I'd probably have been better informed if the vandals (or perhaps some irate motorist?) hadn't ripped all the reference numbers off the information boards.

I tried, honestly I tried. Then, after ten minutes of wailing and gnashing and generally cursing my fate, I decided I'd be better off abandoning the car park and chancing it on a double yellow line somewhere instead. At which point, in a weeds-and-rubble corner of the car park, I spotted a payment terminal with a card payment slot. And bugger I, it worked, and I decided to stay after all.

After that it was all plain sailing, except that the car park had no exit signs at all, so dozens of punters were doing the Hotel California thing ("you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave"). Eventually the car in front of me bolted for the unlabelled exit that said WELCOME in upside-down letters (you work that out...), and I bolted after him before the all-seeing ANPR camera spotted me.

It doesn't have to be like this. It honestly doesn't!

BJ