Can You Pay a Parking Ticket Using LinkNYC?

Last week I was standing by a LinkNYC kiosk when an elderly woman walking past asked me if it was possible to pay a parking ticket using the device. I said I did not know, and there followed a chatty conversation about how she had just been zapped with a parking ticket, how there really are not any public lots to speak of in the area, and if it is not CitiBike swallowing curbside parking it is television and movie production teams towing your car away to make room for their filming.

She went about her way but her question lingered: could someone actually use a LinkNYC kiosk to pay for a parking ticket? That sounded very Smart City. When she asked it did not occur to me that the 311 app is available on the tablet and that it could be possible to pay for a ticket through that.

Alas, it seems the ability to pay for a parking ticket via LinkNYC is supposed to be available but for some reason it is not. I can’t tell if the problem is with the tablet or the app or what is wrong here but access to the ticket payment screen returns the promising header of “PARKING TICKETS & CAMERA VIOLATIONS” but other than that the screen shows nothing but a big black bar. No amount of tapping the screen caused anything else to appear. I was able to repeat this behavior on other kiosks as well, not just this one. The desktop 311 website allows access to this payment gateway, as does my Android phone’s 311 app, but nothing doing from this or any LinkNYC kiosk.

It’s funny that the woman passing by asked specifically about parking tickets, because from what I can tell that is the only payment gateway on the tablets that does not work. I did not go through every one of these but I navigated to several of the other payment categories and got through to what appeared to be functional resources. Through LinkNYC you should be able to pay for a dog license, your property tax, your water bill, etc. None of the traffic-related tickets could be paid, though.

Let’s say this woman who approached asked me if she could use the kiosk to purchase a DEATH CERTIFICATE. LinkNYC would appear to have had her covered. Via the 311 app I was able to connect to the VitalChek website and click through a few screens, which should be enough to demonstrate that this payment gateway is functional. Sorry for the craptastic photo, I’ll try and get a better one, but you get the idea:

How weird would that have been if an elderly woman approached me and out of nowhere asked “Excuse me, young man, do you know where I can purchase a death certificate from a public Internet kiosk?” I doubt if the ability to purchase a death certificate via LinkNYC kiosks is going to be highlighted in any of CityBridge’s promotional or publicity materials. If I were better prepared for the woman’s question I might have responded “You cannot pay your parking ticket but I can sell you a death certificate, mwahahaha.”

If she wanted to register for and then purchase a New York City Parking Card it looks like that would be possible:

I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that most of these payment gateways actually work. But like certain other features that have come and gone on LinkNYC kiosks I asked the obvious question: Why would anybody pay for anything this way? Just because you can? So much determination and even grit would be needed to punch in a credit card number, home address, and whatever other information a particular payment might require, all of this on a tablet screen that can be extremely difficult to read in bright sunlight, which has no physical QWERTY keyboard, and over an Internet connection which may or may not even be secure. These payment gateways most likely are secure but to the end user there is no way to tell. Still, entering one’s credit card information into a public terminal seems like a no-no.

It reminds me of certain claims made by Intersection/CityBridge/Sidewalk Labs in social media and elsewhere about how much usage these tablets actually get. The only statistic I’ve seen published is how much bandwidth has been consumed of the kiosks’ WiFi. No regularly published data shows how much (or how little) usage something as specific as these payment gateways get, or how many phone calls are made.

Has anyone actually created an account with the Aunt Bertha app via a LinkNYC kiosk? I tried but gave up when the password security requirements proved too onerous to deal with on a barely-readable public terminal with no physical keyboard. I would probably feel differently about this if I had genuine need to create an Aunt Bertha account and if these kiosks were my only option.

Did anyone actually register for health coverage through the New York State of Health website using nothing but a LinkNYC kiosk? It was made to sound as if someone did but no usage statistics were ever published.

A claim that really got under my skin involved the notion that 5,000 people used LinkNYC kiosks to vote in a very specialized election earlier this year. This statement by Michael Pastor, general counsel for DoITT (Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications) was made in an April 18, 2018 hearing on the status of the LinkNYC program:

Just last week we were proud to have supported the New York City Council’s participatory budgeting efforts by allowing constituents to vote for projects in their districts directly on the tablet. Voters took advantage of this function over 5,000 times in just seven days.

Sorry, Charlie, but it is absolutely impossible to believe that voters turned out in the thousands to use LinkNYC kiosks to vote in what was a very specific and specialized voting process. That kind of usage of the kiosks for something like this would have been phenomenal, but with not a shred of evidence on social media or anywhere else to show that anyone used the kiosks to vote in this budgeting process this claim is an obvious lie. By the way this statement was made under oath.

I also saw this claim of 5,000 votes cast via LinkNYC kiosks float by on the Twitter feed of someone who attended that hearing, proving that the 5,000 voters figure was not misheard or a typographical error in the hearing transcription.

This and other dubious claims are enough to make me think I should start lying about things if I want to be a part of the Smart City. It’s true, I think. Lying works. Smart lying, at least.