The Slow Torture of the Brighton Keypad Parking System

The other day I went to the Brighton festival where parking is a problem … Normally I park at the top of the hill and walk down but as I was doubling up between venues for the Fringe I made the brave attempt to actually park in the town centre.  I had printed out maps and plotted my route carefully to circumnavigate Brighton’s complicated one way systems in order to find a car park.  So I parked the car temporarily and as I was driving round the block to the car park I thought … I know I’d park on a meter – there’s only a couple of hours before the meters switch off.

Now there was a time when parking on a meter required a large volume of small change constantly on hand but today we have technology to make it even more painful.  For now we have posts and a number you should ring to enter a reference number… except of course this is only easy if you have already set up an account.  But if you aren’t local you have to set up your account from scratch using only a telephone keypad using 9 numbers to enter 24 letters and a 16 digit card number and security code and expiry date and generate your own pin while you’re at it and, of course, enter a 5 digit location reference number.  Could it be more painful?

They really want us to walk but … the problem is going on public transport I just couldn’t get there on time so I had to suffer keypad code torture.  To make it worse my pen ran out so I had to get out the car to get the number off the post and then get back in to prevent someone seeing me entre my card number…

…and then just when you think you’ve done it all correctly a voice says “Thank you.  Parking for 2 hours [it’s 6 the meter turns off at 8] costs the same as parking over night until 9am tomorrow morning.  If you are happy with this press 2”.  So now you have to press 2 or circumnavigate the entire keypad menu again …so you are forced to give them more money than you need to in order to avoid more keypad torture.  Then again who knows how much money it should actually cost because whereas meters used to show you how many hours you get for how many £ the post tells you nothing at all… it just bills you immdiately.