> 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.

Overwhelming majority prefers shit[0] - people pick from what is made available to them, not from what could possibly exist, and they don't have direct say whether or when what's available changes.

These cashless solutions are just another thing[1] being pushed from top down; the passengers only notice when they suddenly find themselves unable to buy a ticket for coins, but by that point, the decision has long been made, so people only get to whine and complain, or otherwise express opinions that are not actually listened to by anyone with power to change things.

This is not saying that all those solutions are bad or inferior. Just that nobody is actually checking with people whether they want it or not; technology is deployed as fait accompli, and regular people just find ways to cope.

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[0] - Like flies, I suppose. There's millions of them, they can't be wrong!

[1] - Like most technology, really, both software and hardware.

Not advocating for cashless only, but cash also has costs: banks charge for deposits and coinrolls, and you need to protect against robbery

That, + logistics and logistics security in general. I agree, the costs are real; in general, anything physical with mass = costs. So the cost savings are real too - my point is that those are instantly eaten by inflation, so going from cash to cashless and then back to cash isn't a no-op; rather, the first leg quickly turns into a no-op, then the second leg would be increasing costs.

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”.

And then you have kids and junkies sticking twigs and gum in the coin mechanism. A card only system can be a single solid slate with minimal upkeep.

Combined with the fact almost no one uses cash in Australia.

Even then with cards they may still need to consider fraud via skimmers, or that the equipment can be vandalized. Going app-only (or vastly reducing the availability of payment machines) means less upkeep for them, but it also moves the kind of fraud to where people have replaced the information or QR codes to scan. It seems like a parallel to what google and whatever entities are pushing them to make these changes are trying to do, at some point someone has to put in work to keep the system working securely and everyone wants to delegate it to someone else.

At least in Australia, skimmers haven’t really been an issue for a long time. Everyone uses paywave / nfc payments. The ticket machines I’ve seen installed lately don’t even have a way to insert the card or a pin pad.

They are in theory still possible to destroy but it’s a lot harder and the little electronics left are cheaper to repair.

There should be a legal requirement then, that there's an office you can go to and buy vouchers with cash, which you can use on the machines. There's no need to collect the cash from all the meters but you can still pay cash.

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.

> 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.

Is there some law saying they can’t?

This is a carpark. If you own a car, you are legally required to hold a CTP insurance policy as a condition of registration-so to be able to use the facility, you legally need to be customer of one type of private financial institution; given that, is it really problematic if council requires you to be a customer of a second kind as well, when close to 100% of the population are?

The catch would be you actually need to have zero bank cards. That is extremely unlikely hence no one has done it.

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.

...are you implying that digital money is worth more than digital?

because I doubt anyone who spends cash regularly is holding much of it long enough to lose value to the digital ones in their checking account.

No, they're implying that you need a lot of coins to pay for parking.

If you need $6 to pay for parking, and the largest commonly available coin is a quarter, that means you need 24 coins to pay. If the value of currency was such that the parking only costed $3, or if dollar coins were more common, you'd need less coins to pay.

For context, in the Eurozone the most valuable coin is 2 EUR, or about 2.30 USD.

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.

Seriously, I don't understand why these stories have to so often end with someone just giving in and paying. Our society is so disenfranchised. I understand that doing it the right way by sending them written notice that it's an invalid debt takes time and effort, but there are options between that and just giving in and validating their nonsense.

You're right, I pasted this into Claude and it seems to think that there are many avenues. And Claude even named the parking operator by name because they're facing a class action for this very thing:

Claude wrote:

> The broader trend is in your favor. App-only parking companies are facing a wave of legal action nationally. A major class action lawsuit against Metropolis Technologies (one of the largest app-based parking operators) alleges they violated consumer protection laws by failing to provide adequate means to pay for parking and then penalizing consumers for not paying. Lanier Law Firm Tennessee's Attorney General secured a nearly $9 million settlement against Metropolis for similar practices, requiring them to implement clear signage, maintain staffed customer support, and automatically issue refunds when their technology malfunctions.

It's just so exhausting to deal with this kind of thing, I've been super busy and it's not worth it to me to fight over $30, which is exactly the bet these scummy companies are making. I think LLMs lower the cost of drafting serious sounding letters to the point where that should be my first impulse rather than giving up and paying them, which rewards the behavior.

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.

>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.

Budget-wise it becomes impossible.

Coin-operated meters means someone have to come around checking the meter, collect coins, check the parking tickets. One person can only cover so many devices per day.

Then you have mechanical maintenance, with that comes disputes with "it was broken, it didn't accept the money" and so forth.

I've probably forgotten a number of other related things, but compare the above to digital solution.

Parking app, where the customer pays only for the parked time, no fiddling with money or keeping track of time. The parking attendant checks much quicker by just scanning the license plate while walking the rounds (could be done via car and a mounted camera even).

Analog just costs more, and citizens doesn't want taxes to go to things that are not strictly necessary.

It was possible for many decades already, budget and maintenance-wise. You can at least accept a credit card as an alternative. Yes, it's not perfect, but the fully digital alternatives also have drawbacks, as pointed by OP.

Things that were possible become impossible. Once Britain ruled the seas with wooden sailboats. Those boats are not perfect but could they win today’s naval battles? Also no.

I know but you're fighting the cost difference between installing CC terminals and QR code stickers.

Why the snark? Did I misread? I don't often buy a new car, do you? I really don't understand what your last sentence means.

I don't even think this a fair comparison, it's more like keeping the old car just in case or for other family members. But I think I specified enough what I'm arguing already, yes this is unlikely, just not impossible.

> 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.

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.