The extremely busy parking exit
By Yong Soo Heong
When licence plate recognition parking systems first rolled into Malaysia a year or two ago, I thought: Finally, civilisation has arrived! No more fumbling for those elusive cards that vanish exactly when you need them most.
Just glide in, let the machine snap your plate, and glide out with a tap of prepaid payment cards and bank credit or debit cards. Easy-peasy.
But of late, the plot has thickened. One shiny new mall near a posh golf course now insists you tap your card as you enter. Even though it wasn’t charging for parking then. Excuse me? Didn’t the camera already catch my plate? Why the double tap? Is this a parking system or a dance routine?
Then there’s the ritzy mall in Damansara Heights, built over the old Immigration Department site. Ah, the irony — once you queued for passports, now you queue for parking validation. You still have to tap to enter! Somewhere between the car park operator, the financial intermediary, and God-knows-who-else, something that my foggy brain doesn’t know what’s happening between them.
But my latest gripe takes the cake. A highly popular and decades-old mall on the outskirts of the leafy TTDI suburb has decided to regress. Yes, regress.
It has installed licence plate recognition, but — surprise —you must register for its proprietary parking system. For a forgetful soul like me, who hasn’t set foot there in yonks, registration was not on the agenda. Nor was I going to visit it soon since my Best Friend Forever had traversed to the other side of the wide universe exactly four years ago this month.
Cue the comedy of errors at the exit. I thought it’d be a breeze. Tap card, drive off.
Instead, I found myself reversing, apologising, sweating, and performing parking ballet because there was no card pad. Nope.
You had to abandon your car, trek to an auto-pay machine, and key in your plate number like you’re checking into a hotel.
So, there I was, an OKU (Old, Knackered but Unflappable) trudging 800 metres to and fro (Old School Me and Fitbit-free, mind you) to pay for the privilege of parking.
The machine then even flashed a photo of my licence plate back at me, like it was saying: Yes, that’s you, genius.
After paying, it politely asked if I wanted a receipt. Oh, thank you, Your Highness.
I used to think a mall near Angkasapuri along the Federal Highway, with its entrance as narrow as a crane’s neck, was the low point of Malaysian mall parking. But no — today, the mall on the outskirts of TTDI has snatched the crown.