I’m embarrassed that it’s taken me quite so long to discover Admyt. This clever little app that you’ve likely never heard of is the solution to your parking problems. I have to define that these parking problems are relatively small in the wider world, I admit, but they can prove to be a source of regular frustration for anyone who parks in a shopping mall.
I want to reiterate that paying for parking when I go to a shopping mall, probably once a week, if that, isn’t a huge problem in the grand scheme of things.
Admyt does a very simple thing, and it does it well. Drive into most of Johannesburg’s major shopping malls, and the smart cameras at the entrance and exit booms pick up your registration and let you in. I haven’t tried it anywhere else, but most of the major metropolitan cities are listed.
You download the Admyt app (Android/iOS), log your car’s registration details, and if you’re trying to be a helpful husband, as I was, you add your wife’s car into the mix. If you drive into Hyde Park or Rosebank, the cameras scan your registration number, recognise you as a paying customer, and open the boom.
When you drive out, the process is repeated, and your account is automatically debited. No fuss, and no fiddling with change.
That is the kind of modern-day efficiency I expect and am thrilled to discover you can get it from an app. It’s one of the many forms of friction in life that I have minimised for my family. But what it has done has taken the (admittedly minor) schlep out of paying for parking, which, despite being as optimised as possible in this digitally enabled era, is still strangely a source of frustration.
I’ve stood in enough queues to know most of that frustration is usually an accumulation of other irritations and, often, about other people who are less proficient at using those machines. I have worked on my self-growth to evolve to a point – I feel I have evolved – not to get irritated standing in queues. I managed to achieve the same thing – a Zen-like calm, I like to tell myself – about travelling and road rage.
But I do hate wasting time when a simpler solution is possible. I always felt like it was no big deal to just pay for parking. I tried a bunch of the early apps, but they mostly wanted you to pay a monthly subscription. I never saw the value in that, given how infrequently I go into shopping malls.
If I can, I prefer to go to what are now called strip malls, where I can park nearby, walk in the sun to a store and leave. More than anything, it saves me time. I don’t like shopping centres because they are so much bigger. Instead of a short walk from my car to a store, it adds at least five minutes to drive in, and find a parking spot, and another five to ten minutes to walk to where you want to shop.
Not having to queue for parking saves me five minutes. That’s not a whole lot, granted, but in a world of potholes and time wasting, I really appreciate something that actually saves me time.
