Stop the misguided visionaries in Westminster Council before they do real damage

I thought this story must have been a joke when I first heard it. Apparently some bright sparks in London's Westminster Council are going to remove parking meters and instead rely on mobile phones for payments. The arguments, such as they are, suggest that it will be cheaper not to have to send people round to empty the meters, and it will be so much more convenient for the motorist, because they can for example add more time on by phone without going back to their car.

Unless there have been major usability improvements since I last was unfortunate enough to encounter Westminster's mobile payment parking process, I think this will be an unmitigated disaster. Clearly, saving money by axing parking attendants will be one benefit, but the real revenue will come in from fines for cars whose owners have failed to master the technology to book their slot. The usability of the scheme is so far away from acceptable that I'd be surprised if it doesn't result in a minor revolution (or the English equivalent thereof - a letter writing campaing to the Times).

Looking at the guidance material, it is clear that nothing has changed. The instructions for setting up payment are painfully complicated:

Call 0870 428 4009 and follow the touchtone prompts.
Using your phone keypad you will need to enter the following:
Your credit or debit card number
Card expiry date (2 digit expiry month, followed by 2 digit expiry year)
Card start date or issue number (debit card users only)
Vehicle registration number (VRN)*
*In order to enter your VRN, you need to press the key on your phone which displays the first character of your VRN followed by the number which represents the order it appears on that key. For example, for the letter ‘C’ you will need to press 2, followed by the number 3.

Have you got that? I had the unfortunate experience of trying out this mobile payments misery a few weeks ago, and after 5minutes of pain, gave up and went off to find a new non-mobile bay. Westminster Council helpfully provides a log-in option on their website to allow people to create accounts, and this seems to me the greatest ever folly. People who know about, and have registered in advance for the Westminster Council online membership scheme are probably locals, whereas logic suggests that the majority of those needing to pay for parking are from outside the borough, and have not the faintest idea of any of this.

I do applaud the ambition, and mobiles are wonderful things, but forcing people to use them when the technology and usability is not there, is just plain wrong. (As is assuming that everyone has them, and they haven't run out of battery or credit.)

We laugh at the futurists who expected all of us to be zooming round in our jetpacks by now; just because the technology is in place, it does not mean the experience is ready for the mainstream, be it in personal jet propulsion or mobile payments.

I do suspect that the secret agenda here is to make parking so terrifically complicated and painful, that people will leave the car at home. But if that is not actually the case, my suggestion would be to do as Oyster have been doing and trial NFC which seems a logical answer for mobile payments, and allow that to be an alternative channel, perhaps with a discounted rate to encourage adoption. Killing off cash at this stage would be premature, will unfairly penalized those with less tech savvy (am putting myself in that category) and, I predict, lead to far higher levels of pavement-rage, resulting in huge hospital bills that dwarf any short-term savings.

Westminster: Relent, before it's too late!