We were surprised to hear about the “Launch” of Park by Phone in Cork City in the media recently. Our surprise emanates from the fact that this service has been available for years.
I can understand why it was [re]launched, you see it suffers from what we would like to call the American Express syndrome. It is a brand that people are vaguely familiar with, but no one actually seems to use.
It will be recalled that at the end of 2008
…Park by Phone Irl (sic) Ltd cease[d] operation of the phone parking system in Cork City, Ireland. Cork City Council have engaged another company trading as ParkMagic to operate the service.
Interestingly this appeared to be part of an overall shakeup of on street parking in Cork City. Around the same time on-street parking metres appeared on the street. Here at Ambrand.com we upset that we could not use these gadgets, previously unseen in Cork, because we had a balance in our Park by Phone to use up.
Well like the evoting machines up the country the on-street parking meters now lie idle, all disabled for some presumably purposeful reason by Cork City Council.
So we can park again without feeling that we are missing an opportunity to use a gadget.
Or can we? We just tried to check our balance on www.parkbyphone.ie but the domain has been dropped! Isin’t it a pity that Cork City Council haven’t updated their webpage , sure people, who recently heard about the “launch” might think the service has already gone out of business!
Comments