Madrid's New Parking Meters Are Too 'Smart' For Anyone's Good

Parking in Madrid got a lot more complicated today, thanks to the implementation of new "smart parking meters" that, in theory, are supposed to help reduce pollution in the city. So far, they just seem to piss off its residents.

That's because smart meters have taken parking from a two step process—car goes in, coin goes in the slot—to a veritable computer game. From now on, if you park in Madrid, the price you pay will be determined not only by your car's make and model (gas guzzlers pay 20 percent more, hybrids pay 20 percent less), but also by how many parking spots are available on adjacent streets.

"To get the ticket, you have to go to college," one woman who was interviewed by Madrid's El Pais newspaper said of the new meters.

It's something you've probably experienced in a parking garage or city street with one of those kiosk systems, to a certain degree. Rather than paying with whatever nickels and dimes are laying around, you've probably run into parking meters where you push a few buttons and get a ticket. Fairly often, someone in the line doesn't know how to work the thing, and parking becomes a 20-minute ordeal.

Madrid's system is much more complicated, requiring a driver's license plate number and at least four different screens before you can actually leave the area. El Pais reports that the lines in the early, pilot days of the system are completely out of control.

Anyways, what I'm saying is, it's laudable that Madrid is trying to reduce emissions and make its air more breathable. It's a good idea to incentivize people to drive efficient cars. Doing that by tacking on a Euro here or a Euro there to a system that already requires you to more or less guess how much you'll be paying based on other, external factors, probably isn't going to entice people to switch to an efficient car, though. And "smart" systems that fundamentally make our lives more complicated, by making parking less efficient, aren't the way to do it, either.

That was one of my qualms with the technoutopian plan to gamify trash—no one wants to navigate a type screen menu in order to throw away a banana peel. Similarly, making parking in the city an even bigger hassle than it already is isn't doesn't feel like a step forward.