the screen, presumably to help wheelchair-bound users, is only about four feet high, so although it helps a minority of users, it hinders the majority of users, who have to bend double to see a screen with the narrowest viewing angle you’ll find in technology today.

not only is it impossible to read at night time, it’s also impossible to read in bright sunlight, and impossible to read with polarised sunglasses.

needless to say, if English is not your first language there’s a big barrier too.

now let’s talk about the placement of buttons — the plus and minus buttons are either side of the screen, which would work fine if the cancel and pay buttons weren’t at the bottom of the screen, leaving most users in doubt as to whether they’re about to add more parking time or pay an amount before they’re ready.

finally, the customer service is appalling: call to notify them that one of *their* machines is broken and you have to wait on hold for quite a while before you’re put through to an operator, who asks you to quote the serial number on the machine, meaning you can’t just walk away and get to your appointment, you have to wait there to read it out (unless you’re good at remembering six digit numbers).

then, the operator will quote you another six digit alphanumeric string that *you* have to remember to quote if you get a ticket for not paying for your parking.

and THEN you have to find another ticket machine, which can be 400m there and back, buy a ticket, and put it on your dash.

there should be a button on the top of the meter that you can push that sends a radio pager message back to the operators to inform them of a malfunction. yes, you’d get a lot of false reports, but you should also be able to run diagnostics on the unit remotely and be able to tell whether the fault report is correct or not.

grrrr….