Comment by hbn
4 days ago
> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.
Sounds great in theory, but just today I was reminded how impossible this is when walking back from lunch, I noticed all the parking meters covered with a hood, labelled with instructions on how to pay with the app.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/city-of-regina-r...
What do you mean by impossible in this case? Can't you just have the coin-operated parking meters back? Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.
EDIT: I guess "just" is doing some heavy-lifting, so I won't argue this further, but "impossible" isn't the word I would use either. The city could revert this decision, definitely if enough people wanted them to (that's... I know, the hardest part). I just agree with the OP that we technically could go back to slightly less-digital society.
> Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.
Unfortunately, a more accurate way of putting it is: stuff takes cards in lieu of coins. Like, where I live (also EU), ticket machines in buses and trams have gradually been upgraded over the past decade to accept cards, and then to accept only cards.
It's a ratchet. Hidden inflation striking again. Cashless is cheaper to maintain than cash-enabled, so it pretends to be a value-add at first, but quickly displaces the more expensive option. Same with apps, which again, are cheaper to maintain than actual payment-safe hardware.
It's near impossible to reverse this, because to do that, you have to successfully argue for increasing costs - especially that inflation quickly eats all the savings from the original change, so you'd be essentially arguing to make things more expensive than the baseline.
a few years ago the vending machines in my office building started accepting credit and debit cards for an extra fee of $0.35 per transaction. just recently they stopped accepting bills and coins leaving cards as the only option, but are still charging the extra fee.
I feel like this kind of glosses over the fact that a lot of people (I'd say an overwhelming majority) prefer the cashless options anyway.
I don't know if I have any friends who miss carrying coins and cash, or who miss carrying individual bus/subway tickets, but if they do, they're awfully quiet about it compared to the friends who happily say they can't remember using cash.
I'd say that if anything, cashless things are catching up to the general public.
Personally, I'm in favor of keeping things cash-friendly because people shouldn't be forced to be cash-free, but that's only to support a small minority of people.
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Not advocating for cashless only, but cash also has costs: banks charge for deposits and coinrolls, and you need to protect against robbery
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Place where I park my car for work (Gosford, Australia) just got rid of cash payment, they now take card payment only (apparently there is also going to be an app, but they haven’t launched it yet). I think the number one reason is they are upgrading to a new system, and the parking technology vendor doesn’t provide cash payments as a standard option-probably they could implement a custom integration to enable it if they thought it was essential, but cash payments are so rare, it would be a difficult decision to justify. The carpark is owned and operated by the local government, so they need to justify their decisions, either as commercially viable, or else as producing substantial public benefit, but I think both arguments would be difficult to sustain in this case.
It’s kinda easy to justify though from a financial standpoint. If the parking meters take cash, you need all the hardware to accept and secure the cash. Then you need somebody to go around at some point and actually physically collect the cash. Then someone has to reconcile the cash, etc.
So at least from that angle I see it as an easy “government is actually trying to be more efficient” argument.
As a user cash is a pain in the ass. I have to count it out, keep it in my pockets, etc. So much easier to just tap my phone or my card. But yeah that’s a tradeoff in the classic “You’re trading X for convenience”.
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Don't pay and when you get a fine take them to court and state you don't have a bank card. There's jo wat a council can legally require you to enter into an agreement with a bank to use council run facilities, it's likely nobody's challenged them on it though.
Every council I've lived in has still taken cash for every type of council fee, despite their "official" statement being they don't.
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The next level of parking enshittification is pay-by-license-plate, which is starting to become widespread here in Perth, Australia, even for locations that are free parking, and locations that have parking machines. Surveillance just ratchets upwards.
There are places in EU too where parking meters have disappeared and payments are only done through apps. And I am talking about public space in the street, not private parkings.
I do believe that. Pointing out that I live in the EU was completely unnecessary, I meant that I live somewhere in the EU, I didn't really mean to compare it to the US.
no way will they go back to coin-operated. That would mean they have to pay employees to walk up and down to collect coins.
And worst of all, the momey you pay isn't tied to your license plate. If you overpay, someone else can park for free!!
The other problem, in the US at least, is that cash is very low value (inflation), and dollar coins never caught on. I'm not trying to carry around $6 in quarters to park for 2 hours. And that's a pretty inexpensive parking spot.
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And maintain them, which I suspect costs even more. Parking meters do fiddly work, out in all weather, where people hate them and do all kinds of vandalism.
It doesn't surprise me that they want to make hardware maintenance your problem.
I parked in a garage in downtown Tacoma, Washington. The only option to pay was via an app. So I downloaded the app (by walking outside to where there was cell service, because I was, you know, underground in a garage) at which point it threw an internal server error when adding my card. There was no attendant on duty, and no way to pay with a credit card. So I left - just drove out of the garage. Then a few months later I got a fine for $75 for not paying. Then I called them to dispute it, and they offered to waive most of it, but it was still more than if I had been able to pay the fee initially.
I'm sure it was sold to the garage as a way to "maximize revenue and unlock operational efficiency". And sure enough, look, the revenue number is up and to the right. Working as designed.
Just ignore it and never park there again. Change your plate if you really want to pay someone for something.
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Of course it's not impossible; but very incompatible with the agenda per which everyone must become a digital slave, guilty by default, surveilled 24/7, deprived of all privacy, freedom and rights, with TOSes replacing the charade that there is for law now, and impenetrable screens instead of human interaction.
> Can't you just have the coin-operated parking meters back? Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.
That costs money. Coin operated machines routinely are targeted by vandals, with each case making easily 100x the damage for loot. And card-acceptance also has its issues, the terminals need a data uplink, someone needs to take care of the machines. That's why so many (especially private parking lots) shift over to purely app based schemes. Orders of magnitude less tech you need to worry about.
>Regina city council made the decision to remove the coin option at downtown meters as part of the budget deliberation process, said Faisal Kalim, the City of Regina's director of community standards.
Yes, I read the linked article. Yes, the city made this decision. The decision could be reverted. I understand that this is a type of thing the OP (top-comment in the thread) is wishing for.
I don't see the "impossible" in my understanding of the linked article.
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Where I live, in the EU, we just have signs and the parking meters have been gone for several years
I found one parking lot in the EU where there were only signs, and the signs not only pointed to an Android+iOS only, attestation-protected app, rather than a website, but an app that, at least on Android, was region-locked to only allow installations from people with the local country set correctly in Play Store (something completely different than the country Google sets for your account, for some reason).
It was a public lot, and the only lot in the town, as far as we could tell.
They are saying that things that have already been dumbed down can't go back. Obviously that's just their opinion, but I would guess that most people agree with them.
I also live in EU. In Sweden. Most places don't even have parking meters anymore. You're just expected to use your phone.
And cashless is the default.
No because those cost more to maintain than the digital ones. Nobody is restoring the budget that got cut because the meters got cheaper.
I'm reading this discussion, and allow me to give you my two cents. It's not a matter of being impossible, but rather how much the rest of society is willing to pay to maintain such infrastructure (either through higher taxes when dealing with the government, or through more expensive goods/services when dealing with corporations, since companies need to maintain old infrastructure that most people don't use).
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
This cuts both ways. Since smartphones are becoming such an essential necessity, we should never ever remove the possibility to adjust these devices for our own requirements
It's kinda dumb that you can't tap your card. At least they have a phone option, but really, why no CC?
I'm guessing it's a lot more expensive to install and maintain card readers than to essentially just have signs prompting people to use their phone.
Right, and builders now build homes with Ring cameras pre-installed. Surveillance chills aside it's about building rent-seeking into every corner of the economy, and that's a top-down goal of modern capitalism. Requiring a smart-phone to park is just part of it, and it goes back to the parent comment that there is something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.
To me it proves that Google's steps to lock down phones isn't really about security. To them the scams that happen are acceptable losses. The scammed will still use Android and still click on ads and still let themselves be tracked and marketed to as before. But if Google can use the excuse of security to edge out alternative apps and app stores they will spend plenty of money and time to do it.
This isn't security, it's sealing a hole in the sales funnel.
>how to pay with the app.
Or by phone.
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