I was chatting to a friend last week as he downloaded and installed yet another app to pay for parking his car. He already had eight different apps to pay for parking on his phone, and yet the one used by this car park wasn’t one of them. So now, he had nine different apps installed to pay for parking.
I had a look at my own phone and counted six parking apps: Connect Cashless Parking, PayByPhone, Trust, RingGo, YourParkingSpace and NCP. And, from memory, I’ve used five out of the six over the past month; NCP is the only one that I don’t use regularly.
Then there are those that I’ve uninstalled – Flowbird, AppyParking and APCOA Connect. APCOA Connect seems to use the same database as Connect Cashless Parking thankfully, and I’ve only had to use the Flowbird app once for one specific car park. AppyParking was used by our local authority for a while but has been replaced with APCOA Connect/Connect Cashless Parking, and I haven’t needed to re-install it.
The convenience of parking apps
Parking apps are a convenience. I tend to carry very little cash around, and frequently have no change for a ticket machine, so the apps allow me to make a card payment. They also remember your details, such as your car’s registration number, and so they can be quicker than using a machine.
Some apps, like Trust and MyParkingSpace, offer automatic payments in supported car parks. Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) cameras record entries and exits, and I get emailed a receipt based on the time spent there. It’s not widespread but it’s useful where it’s available.
Parking apps headaches
But the fact that there are so many of them, with different interfaces, is a faff. You have to register an account with each one, and not all of them support Apple Pay or Google Pay so you need to enter your card details each time. And there’s usually a ‘convenience fee’ thrown in; sometimes, as little as 8p but one car park I use regularly adds a 15% fee on top of the parking price for using the app.
There’s also the upsells – what Cory Doctorow may call ‘Enshittification‘. Every time I use the PayByPhone app, which is typically 2-3 times a week on the way to work, I have to decline additional insurance to cover my car whilst it’s parked. What’s worse is that the parking itself only costs £2 – the insurance is a 250% mark-up. I guess some people could find it useful as there’s no excess and it could avoid claiming on your own car insurance, but there’s no way to disable these prompts in the app. You have to opt out every time you park, and of course, the ‘not now’ button is smaller and less prominent. Meanwhile YourParkingSpace flogs a load of offers at you after you’ve parked.
And there’s the issue of how big these apps are. The Flowbird app is almost 200 MB, which could be 20% of someone’s monthly data allowance if they had to download it on mobile data.
Consolidation
I mentioned that Connect Cashless Parking and APCOA Connect use the same database and are therefore interchangeable, but every other app only works with certain car parks. Annoyingly, this is even the case where there’s a common parent company. Connect Cashless Parking, for example, is owned by PayByPhone, but you can’t use the PayByPhone app to pay for parking at APCOA Connect locations. Similarly, MyParkingSpace was taken over by Flowbird two years ago, but there’s been no integration of the databases and so you may need both apps.
This is why this blog post isn’t ‘which is the best parking app?’ because, as consumers, we don’t get to choose. The choice is made for us, by whoever owns or operates individual car parks. Right now, those owners and operators have plenty of parking apps to choose from, but whatever choice they make is then imposed on their users.
One parking app to rule them all?
Whilst I’m sure it would be very low down on the new government’s priorities, it would be great if there was just one, national app that we could all use. To encourage adoption, there could be new legislation mandating local authorities to use it once their existing contracts have finished. It could also offer onward travel options, such as bike hire, or even public transport to encourage park and ride schemes. And there could be an open API to allow some of the third party apps to continue to use it, with some kind of payment reconciliation for private car park owners.
That way, you could view all of your parking receipts in one place – great for people who may need to claim expenses – and not have to faff around with downloading a new app each time you park up. Hopefully, such an app would also be designed with best practice in mind, and not offer annoying upsells each time. I know this is very much a first-world problem, but we can dream, can’t we?
