Dubai: Malfunctioning of the mParking system continued to cause inconvenience to motorists as they complained that they were often unable to pay parking fees using mobile phones.
Failure to pay or renew eparking tickets using the mParking service forced motorists to run for coins but many still lost the race and found parking tickets slapped on their vehicles.
A motorist, who was given a fine on Monday evening, explained that he paid the parking fee using the mParking service and got an SMS confirming his transaction after two minutes of paying.
After 50 minutes, he got an SMS request to renew his parking ticket and he did so using the mParking service and again got an SMS confirming his payment. But within minutes, he got another message that his transaction had failed. He rushed to his car to pay for the parking using the parking meters but it was too late as the parking inspector had already given him a fine of Dh100 for not renewing his parking ticket.
"I fail to understand why the inspector's PDA was not updated about the malfunctioning of the system. I consider it unfair and a rip- off and request the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority [RTA] to cancel all the fines issued as a result of their system failure," said Jevan who got two fines in two days for failure of the mParking system.
A number of other motorists told Gulf News that they tried paying the parking fee using the mParking service but it did not work properly.
"I am confused whether to use the mParking service in future. I paid the fee using the mobile phone on Monday, got the confirmation message within two minutes. As I entered my office, I got another SMS about five minutes later informing me about failure of the transaction. I rushed back to the car from my office to purchase the parking ticket using coins at the parking meter," said another motorist.
A senior official at the Parking Department of the RTA said the mParking service was facing technical glitches due to heavy usage. The number of people using mParking has increased manifold recently.
