People risk being wrongly fined due to apparently faulty ticket machines in Wokingham town centre, a charity shop volunteer has claimed.
Brian Turner says ticket machines at the Easthampstead Road East and West car parks have not been processing attempts to pay by card.
The 57-year-old Bracknell resident says it means people unable to use alternative ways of paying – such as coin or the Ringo phone app – could get caught out, and may have to turn away.
But Wokingham Borough Council says the machines have been working correctly, and there are several reasons why a payment may not work.
Mr Turner told the LDRS: “You can’t get a ticket to display. The other day I saw a gentleman who’d come into town to try and cash a cheque having problems. I tried to help him for 20 minutes, then he said he’d just have to take a risk.
“People can’t go about their daily business in Wokingham. It’s just causing anxiety over parking.”
Mr Turner said that rather than process card payments in recent weeks, the ticket machines instead get stuck on a loading screen. Videos he showed to the LDRS appear to confirm this, with another customer asking if the machine is ‘playing up again’.
He also said that for ‘more than a year’ machines would often show an error message when trying to process card payments – and that his more recent troubles only meant the problems had gotten worse.
He says he was fined after he was unable to ‘check out’ of the car park following a volunteer shift at Oxfam in Wokingham on February 29. But he says his appeal to Wokingham Borough Council was dismissed, despite video evidence that machines weren’t working.
Mr Turner, who has worked as a project manager for a software company, said there had been similar problems with the ticket machines at the car park for months.
He believes the machines should record every payment error and send it to whoever is responsible for managing them.
The council said more than 290,000 transactions were successfully completed at the two car parks over the past year. It added that there is a helpline phone number on the machines, and that errors are repaired as soon as possible after they’re detected.
A Wokingham Borough Council spokesperson said: “When transactions are aborted, it could be because the machine or the card used are faulty, the card needs to be inserted and the PIN used, the card used to check out is not the same one used to check in, poor signal strength for the mobile mast, high volumes on the phone network at peak times of day, contact with the bank timing out or the customer cancelling the transaction.
“Officers on patrol check the ticket machines are working and all our car park machines are repaired as soon as possible when we identify a fault.”
