Parking meters: above all, let's make it easy

1. With the arrival of October, the DGT awaited us with more regulatory changes that make our heads spin and which have already been applied since Thursday. These are variations in the regulations that affect car drivers as much as those who get around by motorcycle, bicycle, or scooter. And, in turn, the pedestrian, who is always the punching bag in the story of coexistence on the asphalt. In the name of safety and the environment, every measure seems, on paper, well-intentioned. Later, when you encounter it, it is a whole different story. Today, however, we will set aside Pere Navarro's attempts and inventions to improve our lives and focus on one of my obsessions (which ARA readers might already know after sixteen years of back-page columns): parking meters.

2. Since 2011, a couple of times a month I travel to the various towns in the country that have a library and that invite me to the always pleasant exercise of participating in a reading club. This has allowed me to park in more than two hundred different locations in our territory. The first observation is that our public libraries are, as of today, an authentic state structure, essential nests of knowledge and culture and, also, spaces for integration like perhaps no other. The work of librarians is not paid well enough. The second observation is that there are perhaps not three towns with the same model of parking meter in Catalonia.

3. There are options for all tastes. Each town has its own distinguishing feature. Sometimes you have to leave the ticket on the glass; in others, you don't anymore. Do you have to enter the license plate first, or is it not necessary? You have to decide, first of all, if you are in a green zone or a blue zone or a red zone (which also exist)? Will you want to pay by card or with cash? If you want to pay by card and it works—hallelujah—you first have to press minute by minute until you wear down your nails before reaching the time limit. If you want to pay with cash, on many occasions it says the machine doesn't accept it and then you have to look for the nearest parking meter. Sometimes it's the other way around, where the machine only accepts coins. In the best of cases, assuming the screen can be seen and isn't washed out by a blast of sun, you have to find the payment function. There are places that first ask you in which language you want to operate, then give you menu functions—"cancel fine"—that you don't know how to skip. In recent years, you have to enter which label your car has, to get a discount or to be charged more, depending on how much you pollute. There has been a county capital where, after spending hours in front of the parking meter, a local resident warned me that with the blue label, the zero-emissions one, I didn't even have to pay or get a ticket. I could park in any zone all day without having to do anything.

4. I'm not asking for so much. We want to pay, but for them to make it easy for us. And, when you least expect it, the DGT decides that every city council has the right, if it wants to and approves it, to make SUV cars pay more, which are bigger or heavier. That is to say, now we will spend even more time in front of the machine to enter the size and mass of the car that, when the time comes, we won't know what it is. Are they really going to make it that easy for us? Is it not enough to pay the mechanical traction tax, based on the car's horsepower? Couldn't they, in the 21st century, create an efficient, simple, and national mobile phone application that could be used to park in any municipality where one has to pay and have the revenue go to the corresponding city council? If in the age of AI this is not possible, couldn't they hold a public tender to set all parking meters in Catalonia with the same operating system? With a reasonable commission for the party that commissioned it, perhaps this could be resolved.