Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:46 on 5 July 2026

Some time ago I ran across this sign in Queen Elizabeth Park:

Time for a trip down memory lane: it didn’t used to be that way. Oh, there’s been pay parking in that park for decades now. It just used to be via machines that took cash. This once caused me trouble when I was up for a visit from Seattle, since I didn’t have any loonies on me at the time.

There is a way to use technology to improve such bad user experiences. Install machines like this:

Those take, in addition to cash, credit cards. They dispense time-stamped receipts that you then adhere to an inside window as proof of payment. As a bonus measure, add the appropriate near-field communication support and such a kiosk can easily support things like Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

But that’s become old-fashioned, I guess. Just expect people to have their phone with them at all times. Even if they may be international visitors who haven’t yet purchased a Canadian SIM card, or sprung for international roaming. Even if they are trying to detox from the Internet and have chosen to leave the phone at home. To paraphrase Jello Biafra: “Shut up and be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory.”

The turd on top if it all is that you can’t just use your phone to pay for parking. You have to download a special app and use that. There is simply no reason for this requirement. None. Web servers have allowed people to pay for things for decades now. The only thing that requires is a web browser, a standard multipurpose application that ships with every phone.

Every app one installs might have security issues. Some apps one installs will have security issues. Sooner or later, it is bound to happen. The way to minimize the risk is to minimize the number of apps one has installed.

Related to that is how no single payment app can do it all. (Contrast with a web-based solutions, where one browser can visit any payment web site.) So what happens when a visitor, even one with local cell service, happens across a parking lot that doesn’t support the app used in the visitor’s hometown? They have to download the new app, of course. Which can be a slow, painful process on a mobile Internet link. The problem is made worse by such apps generally using frameworks like Electron which produce badly bloated software. Upshot is that the simple act of paying for parking, which used to take under a minute, can easily take five minutes or more.

Part of the problem, of course, is the widespread prevailance of garbage frameworks like React, which use bloated, inefficient Javascript under the hood. This makes the websites in question a dicey proposition when run from a possibly bandwidth-limited mobile Internet connection. But, that’s still mostly a cultural problem (groupthink has made garbage frameworks popular, when rational behaviour would have shunned them into irrelevance). There’s no technical reason the Web has to be such an obnoxious user experience for mobile device users.

And yeah, I realize that this might make me look like an old guy shaking his fist at a cloud. So be it. Nothing I have said above is untrue. The Internet does not have to suck as much as it does. Better technology exists now, waiting to be used.