I’d like to congratulate the utter idiots who came up with Westminster Council’s Parking By Phone system. It must be a very nice way of earning the council a pile of cash through parking fines, because it is the most opaque, time-wasting load of rubbish I’ve come across in a long time.
In certain parts of Westminster, namely Queen’s Park, they are trialling a Parking by Phone system which means that if you park on a meter, you can no longer stick in a quid, slap on a ticket and do whatever you have to. Oh no. You have to waste half an hour of your life registering for an account to pay and get an 11-digit number that you have to input and then pay by credit card.
The system is so badly designed that when you put in your car number plate, it backtracks after every three figures and becomes so confusing that you’ve no idea where you were, end up putting in the wrong bloody information and having to start again. Half an hour later, 10 years older and one parking ticket the poorer.
And the best bit is that if you try to talk to a human, there isn’t one, only some poor woman in customer services whose job it is to re-route irate callers back to the unusable payment line.
I know, I know. It’s just another way to try to part me with my car, but stuff like that just makes me militant. Give me a decent public transport system and I’ll use it. Give me buses that won’t let me on with a pram, and I’ll take my car, thank you very much.