Sarah Madden

I obviously drive a lot with work and I travel a lot with work.

I travel a lot generally around Ireland and I find it so deeply frustrating that every county, every city council seems to require a different app.

Fionnuala Jones is a broadcaster, podcaster and self-confessed parking app hater.

I'm someone, because I'm travelling so much and going with work, often I'm late or rushing.

So to get somewhere and park up and kind of be ready to go and then to have to realise I can't even go to a machine, we'll say, or something because they don't take card or whatever else.

To be met with the barrier of, OK, now I have to wait, download this app off my data, sign up, give my email, give my full name, give my first child probably to avail of this parking space.

It seems so nonsensical to me that we have...

85 different apps on your phone.

The most recent example for me is I travel into Oxford to see a friend and I needed an app for that.

You know, and say I didn't go back to Oxford for ages.

That app then just sits on my phone, like wasting away on a screen that we don't, that I never see again.

Some of them are a lot more old fashioned, just even in terms of aesthetics and like drop down menus and how to use them.

They're not incredibly user friendly.

There's an element of human error as well.

Like if you put in the wrong

license number, like you have to add a different car then.

And you know, if you change your cars, you're having to deal with all that as well.

Having all of these different apps, systems, code colors, you know, like trying to remember that is so confusing.

I found myself stuck with that before in, I think I was parking out in Swords for something.

And you know, sometimes the sign, you're going in and I remember going into a shop and asking like, what parking zone is this so I can pay on the app?