Fail Safes
I first encountered a license plate reading technology at Pearson Airport in Toronto. I think it was a decade ago but I can’t be certain. I noticed it when the parking ticket for short term parking that was dispensed from the machine as I entered the garage had my license plate printed on it.
Eureka! The future. I had always feared the wind blowing away my parking ticket or losing the ticket in a jacket pocket, or it sliding onto the ground as I shut the car door. If that were to occur, I’d be hit with an enormous “lost ticket” fine.
My mind spun as I thought what registered the license plate upon entry could do. Imagine not needing a ticket! Imagine the payment being done automatically.
Despite the technology being available, it wasn’t until many years later that a version of this was deployed at the airport. It wouldn’t be until I was overseas that I saw it deployed en masse. Here, the system also connects with an app so you can enter parking garages and have the payment linked to your account. You can then enter and exit parking garages without needed to pay or even present the ticket.
As you enter a parking lot, a camera registers your license plate. Then on exist, another one scans you at the exit barrier and if you’ve registered, that’s it. That being said, it works well until it doesn’t work at all.
Recently, I was staying at a hotel and the front desk didn’t register the license plate. I had given my ticket to the hotel so had no means of even presenting a ticket. The security guard was also powerless, except for calming down the growing line of angry cars behind mine. Five minutes later, the car was registered and the barrier was raised.
When the engines fail on an aircraft, the aircraft can still glide. Nuclear power plants have multiple fail safes for different problems. Here, the fail safe was the intercom button. When designing some new feature for a product, it’s a good idea to think about the use case when the new feature stops working altogether.
