Everyone owns a parking app now

You arrive with change in your pocket. The machine will not take it. The sign says to download an app. You download the app. The app wants your email, a password with a capital letter, and the make and model of your car, which you have known for years but which has drifted from your working memory on the way from the car to the machine. By the time you have paid, the two children in the back are complaining, the free fifteen minutes have gone, and so has the pleasure of a quick trip to the shops.

This is now routine. It is also, cumulatively, a reason that smaller town centres are emptying out. If a visit to a greengrocer requires setting up an account and accepting the terms of a company you had never heard of, a lot of visits do not happen. People drive to the supermarket car park instead, because it is free, and the greengrocer closes.

What councils thought they were doing

The appeal of a parking app, from a council’s point of view, is simple: no coin-collection, no theft from the machines, cheaper to run, more data about who parks where. That is a defensible reason to make an app one of the ways to pay. It is a bad reason to make it the only way.

In most towns, the machine was kept alongside the app for a few years, then quietly removed because it was being used by fifteen per cent of drivers and the maintenance contract was expensive. The problem is that fifteen per cent of drivers are usually the fifteen per cent who most need an alternative: visitors, older people, anyone whose phone has run flat. They are not shouting about it on local Facebook because they are not on local Facebook. They are just not coming into town.

Why there are so many apps

The apps are a free market. A council procures one; a private operator buys the car park down the road; another council in the next borough picks a rival. Each app has its own account, its own login, its own way of extending the session, and its own small surcharge. You end up with three apps on your phone for the same thing, because a weekend of visiting people in different parts of England takes you across four jurisdictions.

No regulator has quite managed to draw a line through this. The Plan for drivers talks about making payment simpler, and there have been promises of a single national standard. In practice it is still three apps and a rising sigh.

A town centre is a shared space. Its car park ought to behave like one.

The surcharge you did not notice

Most parking apps charge a small convenience fee. Twenty pence is common. On a one-off visit, nobody cares. On a weekly trip to the same high street, it adds a few pounds a month to the cost of parking, quietly. If you push back, the operator says the fee covers operations and the alternative is to use the machine. The machine does not exist. The fee is the parking.

There is a further, quieter cost: the time to set up the account, the three minutes each time while the app updates itself, the texts, and the mild fear that when the time runs out your car will be ticketed before you can tap extend. The companies have not priced that cost because they do not pay it. You do.

What to do, personally

If you drive into the same town often, set up the local council’s app once, properly, at home, on a strong signal. Put the car in the app. Save a card. Do not do it standing in a car park in the rain. For occasional trips, keep a small note in your glove box of the account you have set up and the password hint, because the one you tried to remember in May will be the one that locks you out in October.

Carry a card with you. More and more car parks still accept contactless at the barrier even where the machine has gone, and the surcharge is sometimes lower for a card than for the app. If the barrier is down and nothing is working, ring the number on the sign; if it is after hours, take a photo of the sign and of your car, and if you get a notice, appeal using the process on GOV.UK. You usually have 28 days to pay a parking ticket, and a fair appeal in writing is often successful.

What councils should do

A sensible policy would be short. Every council car park accepts contactless at a visible terminal, with no surcharge, as the default. The app is a second option for people who like it. There is a free fifteen minutes for a quick shop, with no account required. There is a human to ring during opening hours whose number is on the sign and who can be understood over a lorry. There is a published maximum surcharge for the private operators who serve the same town.

None of this is utopian. Most of it exists in a few places where the councillor in charge has an older neighbour who kept complaining. The rest of the country is waiting for the next fare review to notice that getting into town is as important as getting across the country.

And the data

Each of these apps is a small advertising business in waiting. The terms permit the company to use your location, your postcode and the pattern of your visits for product improvement. There is no good reason they should need any of that beyond the duration of your ticket. If you can, set the location permission to only while using the app, say no to marketing, and ignore the pop-up that asks if you want to rate the app five stars on your way out.

The quietly simpler world

If you live somewhere lucky enough to still have working machines, treat them well. Feed them a pound. Carry a pen in the glovebox to write down the registration they ask for. They are the last of a species, and when they go, the park will be about half a per cent more profitable, and the high street a little quieter. Nobody will miss them until they are gone. By then the appeal will be handled by a chatbot, and the chatbot will not know what a pound coin is either.