This happened to me this morning. You see, I was making my morning walk and I passed a man at a parking meter. It turned out to be that it ‘didn’t work’ because the parking meter would become active at 09:00 (it was 08:43) when paid parking is required. Why?
Not the paid parking, but the inconvenience given to the people. It took me less than 2 minutes to create a solution in my mind and parking meters are not really that sophisticated. If a parking tine is allocated, like from 09:00-19:00, at 19:05, the option of a prepay button appears and then just press the button prepay and select the time (example 2 hours). That mean that at 19:05 you have a ticket with the parking time from the next day 09:00 until 11:00. It took seconds to select that solution and without effort. So who instigated that system? Why was that not an option from day one? I walked a little more that morning and saw that none of these parking meters had that option. I would have had an excuse as I have no car, but the rest? They never used a parking meter? It takes little effort to think out off the box and select a solution that helps consumers. It took so little and as such I have to consider are these programmers just there to make money without the blame of going the extra mile? How silly of them and how silly for the communities that didn’t think the way some thing (in this case Burwood, Sydney, NSW) could be created.
The setting of thinking the space a little further takes so little. Perhaps a brainstorming session over coffee with the project manager, but likely he has too many projects. Does that excuse him (or her)? I don’t think so.
So what do you think? Doe parking meters in Toronto, Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, London, Paris or Munich have this option? If not why not? In a stage where so much is automated, is automated a mere excuse to not go the distance? That is the wrong kind of cost cutting. When we use ‘automation’ to do less and not better work, it isn’t automation, it is merely sloppy and lazy IT thinking.
Have a great day today.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 