On 09/28/2017 05:05 PM, Paul Boddie wrote: > On Friday 22. September 2017 15.57.26 Florian Snow wrote: >> Carsten Agger <ag...@modspil.dk> writes: >>> * I want to park my car in the city, but it's only possible to pay by >>> downloading one of two proprietary apps (real-world situation in >>> Copenhagen) on my smartphone. Can I refuse to pay an eventual fine on >>> the grounds that I couldn't pay? >> No, you get a fine because you have the choice of parking elsewhere. > If Copenhagen is like other cities, the opportunities for parking elsewhere > may be very limited. In Oslo, I either *don't* want to know or I would > *really* like to know (depending on how much I feel like looking closely at > some potentially corrupt dealings) how the parking situation got to be some > kind of cartel where supposedly "managed" parking is outrageously expensive > and where many people consequently have to play the automotive equivalent of > musical chairs to hunt down the limited number of available, free, on-street > spaces that are the only real long-term parking option for many people. In Copenhagen, it used to be so that ouside of Jagtvej/Falkonér Allé, parking was free.
It's now changed to payment-only nearly everywhere in the city proper. This means that free parking is only available approaching the suburbs. Now, I wouldn't have a big problem with that - if only they had a good old-fashioned meter that will accept coins. Or even a credit card. But no, you *must* download a proprietary app, different ones for different parts of town, and I think there's two annoyances here: * It's unacceptable that you're actually required to carry a smartphone (Android or iOS only) to do something completely commonplace * It's unaceptable that you're required to install and use non-free software to do it.. > It is a question of accessibility in a broad sense. If people can interact > with the payment mechanisms using public infrastructure then there is no > problem. However, "apps" are the modern form of the kind of private networks > that various corporations wanted to cultivate before the general Internet > became popular. It would be like someone in the 1990s saying that you could > only park if you had either a Compuserve account or were an eager early > adopter of Apple's eWorld (or whatever it was called). Exactly. And even though requiring a smartphone is not strictly a software freedom issue (you might be able to use one with free software only), I do think it's a question of how we want our cities to be in the digital era. Do we want them to be system-friendly, requiring people to cater for the whims of software developers, or people friendly? "People friendly" would be to always allow common infrastructure to work without people carrying specific electronic gadgets. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
