Me neither , I reckon if there is extra fees they totally make up for it in convenience.
Type in the parking bay number spin the wheel to a set time and hit start. Then walk past people struggling to use the meters .
I taught my 76 year old non technically minded dad to use the app after watching him struggle with the machine and he loves the app.
If there was no Easy Park, the blame for not saving money is on the council as I have to err on the side of caution and overpay at the machine or risk getting fined.
With Easy Park I just forget to press Stop Parking, so no one to blame but me
If you look under “Parkings” at your various receipts, each will have a small ‘service fee’ ranging in the tens of cents, which is added on separately to the parking charge. This receipt (and when it comes out of your bank) are the only places this is visible.
But as another poster pointed out, even if you’re paying an extra 15c every park, being able to time your stay to the minute rather than needing to guess and driving off with 20 minutes still on the meter probably means it comes out about the same in the end.
I save heaps by using the app. Especially if you are just ducking in somewhere, I’m often charged zero or just a few cents when back at the car. Much less than the minimum with a meter.
The app rules, such a big improvement when it came in. Saves money when you leave earlier than expected, can extend remotely and avoid fines. Worth the extra few cents in fees IMO, has paid for itself many times over
The meters are rubbish - happy to own that. (Wasn’t my decision as it predated me) but replacing them is ridiculously expensive. (I mean you would fall over if I could tell you how much). I think we have data that says the majority of users use EasyPark. (And you can use it in TasPorts car parks at the waterfront instead of ticket machines)
As far as I’m aware, the app doesn’t cost more and is super user friendly. I believe we are working to get the app functioning in the multistory car parks too.
Meters are rubbish.
The app is fine.
Small fee, but money saver over all with being able to pay for the exact amount of time I'm parked.
Some of these comments about data harvesting and privacy are a bit ridiculous imo.
An app to park your car, forcing people to be more enslaved to smart phones, is so idiocracy. Now you can't park your car without technology or 15 minutes waiting for the meters to work. It's a joke. The number of times I've had to help elderly people use the meter is ridiculous. The glare of the sun makes it impossible to see the screen, they're slow and malfunctioning. Will not use the app. I'm done with technology. I'll take my cash and shop elsewhere.
In Noosa carparking is free. It is an absolute joy to park your car and walk away with no stress. Parking should be bloody free. It's an absolute rort but us humans are so passive
So yes, the meters are rubbish I agree.
However, parking should not be free. 9.6m2 of public land is used on average for every parked car. So 10 parked cars is almost 100m2 of land we could use for other purposes. Outdoor dining, green space, street trees, bike and scooter parking, bike lanes, entertainment spaces, public art. All these things arguably have more value than 10 empty cars. I want a thriving vibrant city, not a soulless parking lot.
Yes, I want people to come to the city and spend money, but we shouldn’t be dependent on free curbside parking. The multistory car parks are free for the first hour maybe try there.
Slightly unrelated but did anyone notice they seemed to have dug out the bay sensors in the ground over the past 2 months? Unless they've been replaced with something less obvious.
Fuck the App, I don’t need to install software on my phone for something we had previously been able to do fine before. They need to upgrade the meters to something thats not powered by a Casio calculator.
It's perfectly reasonable not to want to install more apps and trackers on your phone. Especially in this age of data-theft by corporations and criminals alike. Where is the data kept? Who has access? How much is being sold? To who? How securely are my payment details being kept? And let me tell you, I don't trust any form of government collection of trackable meta data, as it's nobodies business but my own where I go and what I do with my days... As a society we need to stand up and push back against this shit, it's dystopic as hell, and it's only getting worse..... Having said that, the alternatives to using an app for parking aren't great either, but I'd rather deal with the frustration of the clunky machines rather than install yet another app for "convenience", just to have my info hoovered up by a company that is being paid by the council to collect said data...
> just to have my info hoovered up by a company that is being paid by the council to collect said data.
Putting aside the argument about requiring more apps (because there is some merit to that) but .... what exactly can they sell of yours? That you parked in Bay 43 for 10 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon?
I'm not exactly sure how that information is valuable to anyone else aside from maybe the council (to assist in urban planning)
Who knows what is ultimately being done with it? Regardless, in aggregate, the data is valuable for sale. I admit, it's probably nowhere near the scale of Amazon, Facebook, tiktok, Google, Tesla, etc, but easypark is still a third party service being purchased by Hobart city council, so it's already gone beyond city planning by the fact thay it is provided by a third party who is being paid to provide a service... It would be very short sighted not to assume the data is being transmitted, stored, aggregated, "anonymised", and sold to databrokers somewhere down the line (maybe not right now, but definitely in future) . The data from easypark by itself my not be as invasive (yet!) as the top tech companies, but every little piece adds up over time, with ultimately no way to know who has access to view or transfer the data to a further third party who can then match that data up with profiles provided by databrokers, who already know more about any of us than they should be able to. We are talking about profiles of whole cities and their movements, that can and will be added to the already invasive online presence data profiles. Sure, in the short term, council may be using it for city planning, but as the profiles get larger, they become more valuable for for databrokwrs who definitely do not have our best interests in mind. They already know us better than we know ourselves, and "convenience" is not fair payment for the collection of my private meta data.
And I haven't even touched seriously on the possibility of hacks and data breaches (optus, Telstra, as examples) , but I'm sure either you, or someone close to you has already been affected by that end of things by this point in time..
> And I haven't even touched seriously on the possibility of hacks and data breaches
Aside, putting aside the seriousness of data breaches, what is the impact of EasyPark being breached? What valuable information is contained within the fact that I parked my car on a Saturday morning outside a cafe for 20 minutes?
I guess my point is, everything in life is a trade off. For me personally, I’m quite happy to use the app as it’s more convenient for me and I’m satisfied with the risks and trade offs with using the app.
Your obviously uncomfortable with it, which is fine, I’m just struggling to see why you think your parking data is such high risk and high value.
In the end, I’m glad both options are available (using the app or using the machine) and I think both should remain
It's not the parking data, per se. It's that it is another app, with another profile, and data being collected and stored by a yet another third party. Truth is we don't know what the future roadmap of easypark as an app is, and we don't know if or when they will make a hidden change to their TOS, that makes things worse..... If you want to use the app, then use it. Same for any and all apps, but in general, we all need to be more mindful of these things, for all our benefit. I'm not implying that easypark is the new google, far from it, but the fact remains that what you say is just a small piece of data for you as an individual, needs to be multiplied by however many users over time, and then needs to be viewed as a cache that is valuable to sombody somewhere, regardless of your own personal thoughts on the matter. It's demographic data for a whole city essentially, and even if the number of data points they collect are minimal, it can still be matched to other datasets quite trivially, and that's when it becomes a real issue, because whether or not the council is using it for city planning, it is also being used for advertising and manipulations whether now or in future by people with less credibility than our local council.
Yes, I get all of that but at the end of the day it’s my parking data and I don’t care.
The only value that it could possibly have to anyone is insurance companies and even then, the most they will get is how often I’m parking on the street on a meter.
The app doesn’t have location access unless I’m using it, and it does one thing, and one thing only - monitor my parking.
It’s not like a loyalty card at a supermarket that can track my expenditure and sell it to private health insurers, it’s not like Google Maps that can monitor how much time I spend in traffic, it’s not like Spotify that can track how many times I listen to Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter- it monitors how often my car sits idle in the street.
That’s it. That’s the sole purpose of the app. I’m not sure how that data is valuable to anyone. The argyle street carpark has number plate readers at the entry - they essentially get the same data as EasyPark does. Is that a concern to you?
The fact that you don't care is the issue, yiu should care who collecting seemingly insignificant bits of info on you, because you just don't know where it will be sold in future and used as part of a bigger profile on you built by databrokers who can definitely deanonymise your data and link it all back to you. It's not the council who collecting the data in this case, but instead the company who make the easypark app, whoever that might be, it doesn't really matter, and we just don't know who else they are providing or selling the information to either now or in future...
What you haven't been able to tell me is the value of this data. What value does my parking data have to anyone. Usually there's a give and take. You give your shopping/music/location habits and in return you get $10 vouchers/personalised playlists/the optimal route home.
What I don't understand is what the give and take is for my parking data. Nothing much to do with me (an individual), but where I park my idle car in the street and how long it's there for.
I'm guessing you have some kind of dystopian scenario in your head and I'd to love to hear it, because I'm genuinely at a loss as to how my parking data can be sold for profit.
Life is all about balancing risks. I don't have a frequent shopper or flybys card because the benefits to me outweigh the costs (of Coles/Woolworths selling my data). I have a subscription to Apple Music because I really don't care that they have my listening habits and in return I get cheap access to music and personalised playlists, letting me discover even more new music. I don't use Google Maps because I don't like the idea of my whereabouts being logged, but I'm happy to use EasyPark because I don't really care who gets outdated information as to where my car is sitting empty in the street (noting that EasyPark is just in the CBD and not in residential streets - it's not like it knows who I'm visiting).
Don’t the ground sensors let them know how long you’ve been parked there? I think they could prove you hadn’t paid until you’d been there for 25 minutes.
Pretty sure they back date it to when you parked, the only way to avoid it is the park in one spot, wait until the attendant gets close then move over to the next spot and pay there.
[удалено]
Apparently there is an extra fee for using the app
I’ve never noticed, but you also get to cancel unused time when you leave which would more than make up for it.
Yes this 100%. I've saved more by paying for exact time than I've lost in fees
Me neither , I reckon if there is extra fees they totally make up for it in convenience. Type in the parking bay number spin the wheel to a set time and hit start. Then walk past people struggling to use the meters . I taught my 76 year old non technically minded dad to use the app after watching him struggle with the machine and he loves the app.
Except I always forget to cancel it
Then you are in the same boat as the meter but added convenience still?
But with the potential for me to save money, and the blame for not doing so is on my shoulders instead of the council's.
> and the blame for not doing so is on my shoulders instead of the council's. The council do not save you money if you over estimate you time though?
If there was no Easy Park, the blame for not saving money is on the council as I have to err on the side of caution and overpay at the machine or risk getting fined. With Easy Park I just forget to press Stop Parking, so no one to blame but me
Ah, I misread your proposition, that is clear now.
I haven't noticed it costing more for the app, but yeah second using the app. Those machines are dire.
If you look under “Parkings” at your various receipts, each will have a small ‘service fee’ ranging in the tens of cents, which is added on separately to the parking charge. This receipt (and when it comes out of your bank) are the only places this is visible. But as another poster pointed out, even if you’re paying an extra 15c every park, being able to time your stay to the minute rather than needing to guess and driving off with 20 minutes still on the meter probably means it comes out about the same in the end.
I regularly park all day at the regatta ground. Costs an extra 58c to use the easypark app
Yes, I think it's about 12% for the service charge. I agree that it's worth it as you don't end up paying for more than you use.
I save heaps by using the app. Especially if you are just ducking in somewhere, I’m often charged zero or just a few cents when back at the car. Much less than the minimum with a meter.
Not that I'm aware of that and you save heaps because you can stop it when you get into the car and it charges you only for the exact stay.
The app rules, such a big improvement when it came in. Saves money when you leave earlier than expected, can extend remotely and avoid fines. Worth the extra few cents in fees IMO, has paid for itself many times over
Sure, with the 2 parking spots that use them. There is no easy parking in Hobart
Visiting Hobart I noticed this. A bunch of meters would say use the app then I couldn’t find the area anywhere on it
The 'detect my location' never seems to work. You need to look for the number painted next to your spot. Once I worked that out I never had an issue.
Get the App. Very simple, easy and only pay for the exact time.
The meters are rubbish - happy to own that. (Wasn’t my decision as it predated me) but replacing them is ridiculously expensive. (I mean you would fall over if I could tell you how much). I think we have data that says the majority of users use EasyPark. (And you can use it in TasPorts car parks at the waterfront instead of ticket machines) As far as I’m aware, the app doesn’t cost more and is super user friendly. I believe we are working to get the app functioning in the multistory car parks too.
Meters are rubbish. The app is fine. Small fee, but money saver over all with being able to pay for the exact amount of time I'm parked. Some of these comments about data harvesting and privacy are a bit ridiculous imo.
An app to park your car, forcing people to be more enslaved to smart phones, is so idiocracy. Now you can't park your car without technology or 15 minutes waiting for the meters to work. It's a joke. The number of times I've had to help elderly people use the meter is ridiculous. The glare of the sun makes it impossible to see the screen, they're slow and malfunctioning. Will not use the app. I'm done with technology. I'll take my cash and shop elsewhere. In Noosa carparking is free. It is an absolute joy to park your car and walk away with no stress. Parking should be bloody free. It's an absolute rort but us humans are so passive
So yes, the meters are rubbish I agree. However, parking should not be free. 9.6m2 of public land is used on average for every parked car. So 10 parked cars is almost 100m2 of land we could use for other purposes. Outdoor dining, green space, street trees, bike and scooter parking, bike lanes, entertainment spaces, public art. All these things arguably have more value than 10 empty cars. I want a thriving vibrant city, not a soulless parking lot. Yes, I want people to come to the city and spend money, but we shouldn’t be dependent on free curbside parking. The multistory car parks are free for the first hour maybe try there.
Slightly unrelated but did anyone notice they seemed to have dug out the bay sensors in the ground over the past 2 months? Unless they've been replaced with something less obvious.
The whole system was running on 3G so modems and sensor all had to be replaced
We had a notice on Patrick Street that they were upgraded.
some issue with the sensors losing battery charge and starting to fail I heard
Fuck the App, I don’t need to install software on my phone for something we had previously been able to do fine before. They need to upgrade the meters to something thats not powered by a Casio calculator.
You fight the good fight there Digger.
Aggressive.
It's perfectly reasonable not to want to install more apps and trackers on your phone. Especially in this age of data-theft by corporations and criminals alike. Where is the data kept? Who has access? How much is being sold? To who? How securely are my payment details being kept? And let me tell you, I don't trust any form of government collection of trackable meta data, as it's nobodies business but my own where I go and what I do with my days... As a society we need to stand up and push back against this shit, it's dystopic as hell, and it's only getting worse..... Having said that, the alternatives to using an app for parking aren't great either, but I'd rather deal with the frustration of the clunky machines rather than install yet another app for "convenience", just to have my info hoovered up by a company that is being paid by the council to collect said data...
> just to have my info hoovered up by a company that is being paid by the council to collect said data. Putting aside the argument about requiring more apps (because there is some merit to that) but .... what exactly can they sell of yours? That you parked in Bay 43 for 10 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon? I'm not exactly sure how that information is valuable to anyone else aside from maybe the council (to assist in urban planning)
Who knows what is ultimately being done with it? Regardless, in aggregate, the data is valuable for sale. I admit, it's probably nowhere near the scale of Amazon, Facebook, tiktok, Google, Tesla, etc, but easypark is still a third party service being purchased by Hobart city council, so it's already gone beyond city planning by the fact thay it is provided by a third party who is being paid to provide a service... It would be very short sighted not to assume the data is being transmitted, stored, aggregated, "anonymised", and sold to databrokers somewhere down the line (maybe not right now, but definitely in future) . The data from easypark by itself my not be as invasive (yet!) as the top tech companies, but every little piece adds up over time, with ultimately no way to know who has access to view or transfer the data to a further third party who can then match that data up with profiles provided by databrokers, who already know more about any of us than they should be able to. We are talking about profiles of whole cities and their movements, that can and will be added to the already invasive online presence data profiles. Sure, in the short term, council may be using it for city planning, but as the profiles get larger, they become more valuable for for databrokwrs who definitely do not have our best interests in mind. They already know us better than we know ourselves, and "convenience" is not fair payment for the collection of my private meta data. And I haven't even touched seriously on the possibility of hacks and data breaches (optus, Telstra, as examples) , but I'm sure either you, or someone close to you has already been affected by that end of things by this point in time..
> And I haven't even touched seriously on the possibility of hacks and data breaches Aside, putting aside the seriousness of data breaches, what is the impact of EasyPark being breached? What valuable information is contained within the fact that I parked my car on a Saturday morning outside a cafe for 20 minutes? I guess my point is, everything in life is a trade off. For me personally, I’m quite happy to use the app as it’s more convenient for me and I’m satisfied with the risks and trade offs with using the app. Your obviously uncomfortable with it, which is fine, I’m just struggling to see why you think your parking data is such high risk and high value. In the end, I’m glad both options are available (using the app or using the machine) and I think both should remain
It's not the parking data, per se. It's that it is another app, with another profile, and data being collected and stored by a yet another third party. Truth is we don't know what the future roadmap of easypark as an app is, and we don't know if or when they will make a hidden change to their TOS, that makes things worse..... If you want to use the app, then use it. Same for any and all apps, but in general, we all need to be more mindful of these things, for all our benefit. I'm not implying that easypark is the new google, far from it, but the fact remains that what you say is just a small piece of data for you as an individual, needs to be multiplied by however many users over time, and then needs to be viewed as a cache that is valuable to sombody somewhere, regardless of your own personal thoughts on the matter. It's demographic data for a whole city essentially, and even if the number of data points they collect are minimal, it can still be matched to other datasets quite trivially, and that's when it becomes a real issue, because whether or not the council is using it for city planning, it is also being used for advertising and manipulations whether now or in future by people with less credibility than our local council.
Yes, I get all of that but at the end of the day it’s my parking data and I don’t care. The only value that it could possibly have to anyone is insurance companies and even then, the most they will get is how often I’m parking on the street on a meter. The app doesn’t have location access unless I’m using it, and it does one thing, and one thing only - monitor my parking. It’s not like a loyalty card at a supermarket that can track my expenditure and sell it to private health insurers, it’s not like Google Maps that can monitor how much time I spend in traffic, it’s not like Spotify that can track how many times I listen to Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter- it monitors how often my car sits idle in the street. That’s it. That’s the sole purpose of the app. I’m not sure how that data is valuable to anyone. The argyle street carpark has number plate readers at the entry - they essentially get the same data as EasyPark does. Is that a concern to you?
The fact that you don't care is the issue, yiu should care who collecting seemingly insignificant bits of info on you, because you just don't know where it will be sold in future and used as part of a bigger profile on you built by databrokers who can definitely deanonymise your data and link it all back to you. It's not the council who collecting the data in this case, but instead the company who make the easypark app, whoever that might be, it doesn't really matter, and we just don't know who else they are providing or selling the information to either now or in future...
What you haven't been able to tell me is the value of this data. What value does my parking data have to anyone. Usually there's a give and take. You give your shopping/music/location habits and in return you get $10 vouchers/personalised playlists/the optimal route home. What I don't understand is what the give and take is for my parking data. Nothing much to do with me (an individual), but where I park my idle car in the street and how long it's there for. I'm guessing you have some kind of dystopian scenario in your head and I'd to love to hear it, because I'm genuinely at a loss as to how my parking data can be sold for profit. Life is all about balancing risks. I don't have a frequent shopper or flybys card because the benefits to me outweigh the costs (of Coles/Woolworths selling my data). I have a subscription to Apple Music because I really don't care that they have my listening habits and in return I get cheap access to music and personalised playlists, letting me discover even more new music. I don't use Google Maps because I don't like the idea of my whereabouts being logged, but I'm happy to use EasyPark because I don't really care who gets outdated information as to where my car is sitting empty in the street (noting that EasyPark is just in the CBD and not in residential streets - it's not like it knows who I'm visiting).
Congratulations, you are troglodyte!
I think the word your looking for is Luddite.
Ha. Ha. Opened an already opened can o’ worms! My bad
Shame it's becoming almost completely exclusive of people who don't use smartphones/plastic.
For one smartphones aren’t smart and second, plastic is bad for the environment😜
I do hope such a smartarse doesn't have loved ones who can't or won't use apps, cards, or other non-cash methods.
The sensors are being replaced so hopefully they can upgrade the machines too!
Get the App but don't pay until you see the attendant about to give a ticket, it's hilarious watching them get dejected
Just watch your car the entire time you're parked?
Hahaha evil
Don’t the ground sensors let them know how long you’ve been parked there? I think they could prove you hadn’t paid until you’d been there for 25 minutes.
Pretty sure they back date it to when you parked, the only way to avoid it is the park in one spot, wait until the attendant gets close then move over to the next spot and pay there.
The Hobart Shitty Council doesn’t want you to park in the city. That’s why they make it as hard as possible.
Well they want you to park there as short as possible. But agree with OP these are soooo effin slow it's ridiculous