Last December, we were on holiday in England. We could pay contactlessly with a card at almost every parking meter. It wasn’t quite as easy in Italy; contactless payment wasn’t common. But the EasyPark app was. Once installed and set up, you can park with relative ease.

EasyPark is also available in Germany. You can either see on the parking meter that EasyPark can be used in the area, or you can check directly in the app. I actually find the idea and implementation of EasyPark quite well done. The problem, once again, lies with German bureaucracy. After all, the parking spaces still need to be monitored to ensure illegal parking doesn’t become attractive.

You might assume that the public order office employees have their smartphones with them and can see in a special app who has paid via EasyPark. Maybe they can, but they don’t seem to think of checking it on their own. At least not according to the parking ticket my girlfriend received. Anyone who pays with EasyPark is required to put an EasyPark sticker on their car. But at the time, this wasn’t mentioned in the app or on the parking meter. At least now it’s in the app.

I would love to know if the public order office actually checks the payment or just assumes it. For people from out of town or first-time users, the system is anything but transparent or customer-friendly. Why keep a simple system simple when you can make it complicated? Well, digitalization isn’t exactly a strength of German authorities. Who could have guessed that a digital parking system would actually be used?