Curse of CASHLESS PARKING

Thought parking couldn’t get any more stressful? Now councils are forcing us to pay by mobile phone. The result: total chaos, unjust fines and sky-high blood pressures

AS a sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis, avril Watson finds walking long distances difficult and painful. and so the 69-year-old was delighted to find a parking space close to the West End theatre where she and her husband were heading for a night out in February this year.

But the minute she tried to buy a ticket, that sense of satisfaction quickly evaporated.

‘We only needed an hour’s parking as it was free after 6.30pm,’ she said. ‘That cost about £4 and in the past I would have fed the meter with some coins and that would have been that.’

Not nowadays. That would be far too simple. a nearby machine that accepted credit cards was out of order and had no facility to take coins, leaving Mrs Watson no option but to pay using her mobile phone. The parking meter provides a telephone number which you must call, leaving details of your car, its location and how long you are parking for.

So the retired hospital manager from Maidstone, Kent, did as the automated voice on the other end of the line told her — using her mobile phone keypad to painstakingly enter her registration, the code for her location and her credit card details. Simple? Hardly. ‘Halfway through the first call I was cut off,’ she said. ‘So I called again and entered all the details. It took a long time and I was in the car, using the interior light to read off the numbers on the card. at the end of the call an automated voice thanked me for using the system.’

Then she and husband Ian went to the theatre, thinking no more about it until they returned later that evening to find a £60 penalty charge notice stuck to the windscreen.

The next day, Mrs Watson duly set about challenging the fine — only to be told by Westminster City Council that it was up to her to prove she had tried to pay.

While her credit card bill showed no payment had been taken, her phone bill proved the two calls had been made. But by the time she presented that evidence to the council the fine had been increased to £80. Further correspondence ensued until, finally, the council grudgingly agreed to waive the fine.

‘I spent the best part of three months fighting it, simply because their automated telephone system was faulty when I tried to use it,’ said Mrs Watson.

‘There are too many things that can go wrong with the process. Whatever happened to the old parking meters you could feed with actual money and know where you stood? It makes my blood boil.’

and no doubt she’s not the only one to feel that way.

across Britain, at council-run and private car parks — both on-street and off — so-called cashless payment systems using mobile phones and smart phones are taking over. Locations offering cashless payment options also include car parks at some hospitals and railways stations.

To ‘ENCouragE’ drivers to pay in this way, the traditional machines and cash meters are being ripped out. Inevitably, what is motivating these changes is a desire to save money — meters need maintaining and emptying of cash. But what of the convenience of the driver — the paying customer?

‘The march of the machines is making life easier for some but a misery for others,’ says Paul green, a spokesman for the over–50s company Saga.

‘Car parks should be designed around people who use them, not for the convenience of the providers. Technology should be used to help liberate people and offer more choices, it should not exclude them.’

What makes the issue infuriating is that paying for parking generates huge amounts of money, particularly for local councils.

Figures calculated by the raC found that in 2013-14, councils in England generated a combined ‘profit’ of £667 million from their day-today, on and off- street parking operations, a 12 per cent increase on the previous year.

The figures are calculated by adding up income from parking charges and penalty notices, then deducting running costs.

While some of the increase in surplus is down to rising income, there is also evidence that many councils are cutting operating costs sharply. For England as a whole, councils’ operating costs for on- street parking fell ten per cent. Interestingly the largest surplus, one of £51 million, was recorded by Westminster, the authority that has pioneered the use of cashless payment systems.

In the past five years some 5,000 cash- operated ticketing machines and meters have

been removed from the borough. This, says the council, saves it £8 million a year — money stolen from the machines and the cost of servicing them.

As a result, more than 90 per cent of payments for parking are now by phone, something a spokesman insisted users find both ‘ easy and convenient’.

While that latter point is clearly open to debate, those savings have encouraged other councils to follow suit and them down the cashless route.

One such is Brighton & Hove City council. Until recently under the leadership of the Greens, it set itself the target of taking out half of its 1,200 old pay-and- display parking machines by June of this year. In their place it has introduced the automated PayByPhone system.

The council estimates the changes will save it £250,000 a year, while also making life easier for motorists. Out on the streets of Brighton, those actually using it seemed anything but happy.

This scheme requires motorists to either install an app on their smartphone, or to call or text a phone number on their mobile and then enter the car’s registration, parking location and duration, and credit or debit card details.

As if that was not taxing enough, each transaction done in this way costs the motorist 10p. Texts sent to drivers confirming the length of stay, and informing them when their parking time is running out, cost up to 20p per text.

When a Mail reporter put the system to the test, the rigmarole of registration through to payment and receiving the initial text took seven minutes.

Similarly inconvenienced was nurse Rosanna Quinn. The 22-year- old had travelled from Gillingham, Kent, to Brighton to celebrate a friend’s birthday but instead found herself standing in the rain trying to type in her payment details.

‘It is such a pain,’ she said. ‘First I had to set up an account and then go through all the various stages. It’s just ridiculous, it would put me off parking here again because it’s so annoying.’

Equally frustrated was 50-year-old Bernie McGuire who watched as his colleague, Veronica Jinks, tried to pay for their parking.

Mr McGuire, a surveyor from Barnet, London, said: ‘We had been trying to pay by phone for the best part of ten minutes. It’s really awkward when you can’t pay by cash, and if you don’t have a debit or credit card you can’t pay by phone.’

Ms Jinks, 55, added: ‘It’s more expensive than paying by cash. It should be cheaper, if anything, and there should be more machines to pay with cash, instead of paying by phone.’

Not only that, the system is far from foolproof. Earlier this year, one unfortunate motorist inadvertently paid £5,340 for a parking ticket which should have cost just £15.30.

The huge bill came about because when the driver was asked to key in the number of hours he would park, he mistakenly entered the location code of the car park.

Brighton & Hove City Council refunded the anonymous driver but he is not alone — some 540 others received refunds after using the system incorrectly in its first year of use.

In a bid to help motorists, the local authority has put on lessons at a library to teach residents how to use new parking system.

In a statement to the Mail, the council defended the new system, saying 120,000 motorists had registered for it, while pointing out that cash could still be used in the remaining machines, or tickets can be bought in 150 participating shops.

(That may be the case, but one motorist who tried the latter option said they ended up queuing in a Co- op waiting to be served for such a long time they feared they would return to find a ticket on their car.) All the signs are that in the coming years more council-run car parks will adopt cashless payment schemes.

Not only are councils under pressure to save money, but the introduction of the new 12-sided £1 coin in 2017 means existing machines will have to be upgraded. The concern is that the elderly, in particular, will suffer as the technology is rolled out.

Ofcom figures show that only one in five people aged 65 to 74 uses a smartphone — and just one in 20 aged 75 and over — compared with nine out of ten aged 16 to 34. When conventional mobiles are taken into account, a much larger proportion of pensioners use one —80 per cent of 65 to 74–year–olds and almost 60 per cent of those over 75 — but many do not habitually carry them.

‘Over 65s contribute about £121 billion to the economy each year, but still their needs are often ignored when it comes to payment systems,’ said Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK.

‘Self-service check-outs, ATMs and other automated systems are difficult to use for some older people, many of whom suffer from arthritis or have hearing or sight impairments.

‘Payment systems are necessary in today’s world but must be designed so that they are available and accessible to everyone.’

But, of course, it is not just the elderly who fall foul of this technology. Another to have found themselves in a drawn-out battle over a failed cashless payment was 53-year-old Lesley Finch.

After driving to her local train station at Leigh- on-Sea, Essex to accompany a friend to a hospital appointment in London she attempted to pay the £2.99 parking fee electronically.

Having previously registered her car and credit card for cashless payments, all she had to do was to ring up and enter a PIN number to activate the payment. ‘ I did everything needed and rushed for my train thinking my ticket was paid for,’ said Miss Finch, a recruitment company director.

‘I had no idea it hadn’t gone through until two weeks later when I received a notice of a £50 fine.

‘ When I looked into the issue, it turned out my credit card had expired. But nothing had alerted me to the problem. I thought I had paid for the parking.’

After sending a letter of appeal to NCP, the company that operated the car park, she was told the matter was now in the hands of a debt recovery agency and the penalty had increased to £129. Having taken legal advice, Miss Finch once again contacted the company pointing out exactly what happened and the fine was eventually dropped.

‘I dread to think of the amount of people who just pay off parking fines even though they are in the right,’ she said.

‘Cash is so much simpler — you know exactly what you are getting and once you have that paper ticket you know you are safe.’

Simpler, maybe. But when it comes to modern innovation, the customers’ needs are rarely at the top of the agenda