75% of UK drivers have experienced failures paying for parking via mobile apps, with 70% citing poor phone signal in car parks as the primary barrier

A RAC survey found that three-quarters of UK drivers have encountered difficulties when attempting to pay for parking via mobile apps, with the top frustrations being lack of reliable mobile phone signal inside car park structures (70%), the app failing to correctly recognize the car park location (36%), and outright app crashes (35%). Additionally, 47% of UK drivers report having been fined incorrectly while using a parking app. Why it matters: When the app fails, drivers face a binary choice between risking a penalty charge notice or abandoning their trip entirely, so 13% of drivers -- rising to 26% for those aged 75+ -- report being unable to figure out how to use parking apps at all, so an entire segment of the population is effectively excluded from parking in locations that have removed physical payment infrastructure, so councils that have eliminated meters and gone app-only to save costs have created a digital accessibility gap, so the populations least able to navigate apps (elderly, disabled, low-income without smartphones) are most likely to receive unfair penalty charges. The structural root cause is that municipalities and private parking operators have rushed to eliminate physical meters and pay stations to reduce hardware maintenance costs, mandating app-only payment without ensuring cellular coverage inside concrete parking structures or providing accessible fallback payment methods. The parking app market is also fragmented -- drivers may need ParkMobile, PayByPhone, RingGo, or JustPark depending on which lot they enter -- and none of these apps have invested in offline-capable payment modes.