Parking apps aren’t just frustrating – they could be costing you more money too

Traditional meters are in decline as local authorities adopt smartphone payment apps, but the move is driving older car owners off the road

The last time you paid to park, there’s a good chance that rather than fumbling for small change you reached for your smartphone. Hundreds of local authorities have turned parking cashless. But the move away from stuffing meters with coins is driving older car owners off the road, campaigners say.
And with the launch of the National Parking Platform which plans to roll out parking by app countrywide in 2024, the reliance on paying to park using smartphones is only going to grow.
Since the first parking meter was introduced in 1935, local authorities have viewed paid-for parking as a handy traffic management and revenue-raising tool. The trouble with cash parking is that meters need emptying and they are at risk being broken into or vandalised. And that means paying people to empty and repair them. 
But if the financial side of parking can be transformed into an entirely online service, councils need fewer staff and parking won’t depend on operational meters.
Enter the parking payment app. A third-party company develops and manages these mobile payment methods on behalf of the local authorities. In theory, all the potential parker has to do is have the correct application on their mobile phone. 
They’re pretty straightforward presuming you have a smartphone and are comfortable using apps. 
You download the relevant app and input your payment and car details. Then when you want to park, you open the app, add the location number on the parking bay or a nearby signpost, input how long you want to stay for and click “pay”.
The two biggest operators, PayByPhone, owned by Volkswagen Financial Services, and RingGo manage about 85 per cent of the cashless parking in this country. The remaining 15 per cent is divided among another couple of handfuls of operators such as JustPark, ParkMe and Park Now.
RingGo, which claims to be the market leader, looks after parking charges at about 17,000 locations in the UK. 
If there was just one of these apps it would make the acceptance of cashless parking easier. But as many will have experienced, standing at the roadside, inputting your payment card and car details into yet another parking app – perhaps the eighth or ninth time you’ve had to do so – is incredibly frustrating.
With everything from banking to paying energy bills now controlled online it’s easy to assume that everyone is comfortable with downloading and using apps. But a great many aren’t. The British Parking Association (BPA) says three-quarters of drivers prefer using cash at pay-and-display machines. 
The same BPA research discovered 28 per cent of drivers are distrustful of new payment technology, while 13 per cent find apps and websites too confusing to use. Dennis Reed from Silver Voices, an organisation representing older people, believes it’s clear age discrimination. 
He said: “The older you get, the less likely you are to have a smartphone. And if you do have one, you won’t be using it to download apps. Driving into a town car park and finding that you have to download an app is beyond many older people. They might not have the close eyesight necessary or have arthritic fingers that make manipulating a phone difficult.
“Councils forget there are millions of taxpayers who find the idea of cashless parking abhorrent. We think there should always be an alternative, even if it’s a card rather than cash payment.”
Charity director at Age UK, Caroline Abrahams, added: “We are a long way away from a world where digital tech can help everyone. Public bodies and businesses running parking services should recognise this.”
Even the parking industry recognises the problem. The BPA’s Dave Smith said: “We advocate that parking operators offer a range of payment options, including cash, but this may not be a viable option in all circumstances. Motorists should feel confident that they can pay for parking with either cash, card or phone wherever they choose to park.”
Anyone who’s parked using RingGo will have noticed you pay a 10 to 20p “convenience fee” on top of the regular parking charge. What’s not so convenient is that if there’s a problem and you receive a penalty, parking app companies won’t want to know. You must deal with whoever has issued the ticket.
Then there are the alerts. A reminder to warn you when your parking session is about to end costs 10p from RingGo. Text confirmation of your booking? That’ll be another 10p.
A RingGo spokesman said: “A convenience fee covers the cost of running the cashless payment services. Costs vary from borough to borough and council to council because in some cases the convenience fee is absorbed by the local authority or parking operator. But in other instances this is charged directly to the motorist. The SMS [text] reminder is an optional service that motorists opt into.”
No matter what the initial cost, it doesn’t take much online searching to find drivers who think they’ve paid using an app, only to find that they haven’t when a penalty charge notice (PCN) lands on the doormat.
There’s even a scam where fraudsters have set up a fake PayByPhone website to entice potential parkers. The idea is that because it looks like the official parking app, you pay it rather than PayByPhone. One driver apparently lost £230 in this way. Hardly surprisingly, of PayByPhone’s 400 Trustpilot reviews, 95 per cent are one-star.
There are several reasons. According to the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU) fewer than a fifth (19.7 per cent) of local authorities claim to make any profit from parking. For half, income from enforcement simply covers its costs. They welcome anything that makes parking enforcement more efficient.
For existing parking meters to accept bank cards they need the 3G mobile network. And that’s being turned off by many operators in the next couple of years. Rather than upgrading the meters, councils are turning to apps.
But the AA’s Jack Cousens warned: “Older and lower income drivers prefer cash and remember not everyone has a smartphone. High streets are struggling too and we don’t need any more barriers to people using them. Car parking should be geared up to support local communities; drivers must have the option to pay cash.”
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