Sounds great in theory, but just today I was reminded how impossible this is when walking back from lunch, I noticed all the parking meters covered with a hood, labelled with instructions on how to pay with the app.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/city-of-regina-r...
EDIT: I guess "just" is doing some heavy-lifting, so I won't argue this further, but "impossible" isn't the word I would use either. The city could revert this decision, definitely if enough people wanted them to (that's... I know, the hardest part). I just agree with the OP that we technically could go back to slightly less-digital society.
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.
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.
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.
--
[0] - Like flies, I suppose. There's millions of them, they can't be wrong!
[1] - Like most technology, really, both software and hardware.
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”.
Combined with the fact almost no one uses cash in Australia.
Every council I've lived in has still taken cash for every type of council fee, despite their "official" statement being they don't.
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?
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.
It doesn't surprise me that they want to make hardware maintenance your problem.
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.
I don't see the "impossible" in my understanding of the linked article.
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.
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.
It was a public lot, and the only lot in the town, as far as we could tell.
And cashless is the default.
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
To me it proves that Google's steps to lock down phones isn't really about security. To them the scams that happen are acceptable losses. The scammed will still use Android and still click on ads and still let themselves be tracked and marketed to as before. But if Google can use the excuse of security to edge out alternative apps and app stores they will spend plenty of money and time to do it.
This isn't security, it's sealing a hole in the sales funnel.
Or by phone.
