> There's absolutely no need for an "app" / "website", a phone, and everything that comes with using that choice, i.e. original posters 10 steps, to pay for parking.

Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.

> The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.

The one instance of this I have seen used an app to connect your licence plate to your payment method.

> Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.

No it means I’ve got to install a junk app for every individual carpark I use that uses their own app.

It doesn’t have to mean that. Over here in Switzerland, it seems relatively consistent.

Would you download an app to flush your toilet?

I might if the alternative was to insert coins into a parking meter.

The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.

If flushing the toilet without an app would suddenly require you to walk across campus to obtain a one-time-use Toilet Flushing Override Token (and no, you can't ask for multiple ones - no "hoarding" allowed!), there would be riots on introduction - and rightfully so! The fact that an app has to exist at all is a symptom of a systemic issue.

Same with parking. ANPR cameras are ancient technology, and many commercial lots already have tap-to-pay at the exit barrier. Or even the entry barrier, for fixed-price parking. Even the complicated cases have you enter your vehicle registration on the payment terminal these days, rather than messing around with paper passes. In this world it should not be complicated to handle employee parking with a one-off license plate registration on some intranet web page, or just allow tapping your employee badge at the parking barrier. Worst-case scenario they'd hand you an EZPass-like RFID tag during onboarding to put behind your car's windscreen.

The toilet-flushing app should not have to exist. It is the ultimate embodiment of institutional "we have tried nothing, and are all out of ideas". Accepting deeply-flawed workarounds for non-problems should not be a normal part of your day-to-day life.

> The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.

Well, yes, that’s exactly my point. It’s not the case with parking, so the analogy breaks down.

> Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.

There are no incentives for them to make a proper app. When faced with a choice of being nice to you or extracting maximum value out of you, those companies will pick the second option every time. Having an internet-connected app is an open invitation for companies to force you to register an account, make you grant their app all sorts of permissions, have you view ads and waste your money. Another incentive is for them to save as much money on developing that app as they can. Combining these two, we get a situation where any company that's not squeezing you for those few extra cents is making an economically inferior choice, and anything digital and connected to the internet has no bounds for how many types of abusive practices can be facilitated through it.

On the other hand, paying at a parking meter is physical and grounded in reality, you can't inject too much bullshit into the process. It's very constrained and you know it will always remain so. They don't have wiggle room to try any of the above. It's boring 20th century 'exchanging money for services' instead of new 21st century 'abusing the user for money and potentially providing a service on the side'.

> You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.

I agree with you with parking garages or tolls. The license plate system is definitely preferable.

But, street parking was not a quick or simple process for 50 years. I used to have to keep a stack of quarters with me in order to street park, which was a huge PITA. Then the meters moved to working with CCs, but they were broken much of the time. Then they put in random kiosks every couple blocks that you had to find and figure out, often having to go back and drop a slip in your car.

Now I pull up, park, get out, and walk off while clicking 'park' in the app. It literally can't be any simpler.

My municipal parking consists of normal parking meters. They accept CCs or cash and are placed on every block. They are rugged and I have yet to see a broken one - if the majority of your parking meters are broken, that's the fault of your city, not an inherent flaw of the tech, as proven by the aforementioned 50 years of people using parking meters just fine. Worst case scenario, if one is broken, you walk a little more to the next meter. If we assume 1% of parking meters are broken, it's still far less of a waste of time than fiddling around with an app 100% of the time.

> Now I pull up, park, get out, and walk off while clicking 'park' in the app.

Oh, you went to a different city or entered a private parking lot? Gotta install their preferred parking app. Just scan the QR code to go to a broken website, or better yet, be forced to waste your data, time and your phone's storage space to download their special app if they don't allow online payments. Now all you have to do is make an account, set up 2FA, enable geolocation so they can tell where you are, type in your plate number, potentially retype your payment information and deal with any errors that may pop up along the way. It's easy!