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Newbie
Total Posts: 3
Joined 10 years ago
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Swarco has "upgraded" their back office and made it less capable than it was before. The removal of the ability to set different time limits and overstay penalties on the same charge point at different times of day now unfairly penalises EV drivers without driveways, forcing them to get up in the middle of the night to unplug and move their car or face a hefty fine. This increases social inequality vs households with driveways. ChargePlace Scotland's network manager Stephen Trayner provided a deeply unsatisfactory and contradictory response to my email regarding this, in which he claims that:
1) nothing has changed, but it has changed
2) variable time limits are a uniquely Scottish issue and therefore apparently suitable for removal
3) it's not ChargePlace Scotland's job to enforce proper charging bay use (and, by extension, meet the demands of the Local Authorities and other charge point owners that are their customers), and
4) he's hopeful that by Swarco switching from GoCardless (monthly Direct Debit) to Stripe (instant payment for charging sessions), charging bay misuse will go away.
There was no acknowledgement of the severe inconvenience that Swarco has caused to charge point owners and EV drivers with their sudden and unnecessary removal of variable time limits. As we saw when Glasgow City Council enacted a 24/7 4 hour time limit on its Type 2 charge points, this will force some EV drivers without driveways to go back to petrol cars: Swarco is actively undoing Scotland's transport decarbonisation efforts and should be held accountable by Transport Scotland, with variable time limits reintroduced immediately or the CPS contract ripped up on the spot.
Further to this, Transport Scotland and CPS should be pulled up on the prolonged and arduous process to approve new hardware for use on the ChargePlace Scotland network. This is not a good look, given that Swarco is also a hardware provider. The case of Dumfries and Galloway Council's Tritium rapid charger that was never commissioned, and had to be replaced with a rapid charger from Swarco, is worthy of explanation; I'll happily caveat that there could be an innocent explanation to this, of course.
I understand that there's a new ChargePlace Scotland app coming soon. Please ask if this shall resolve two major bugs:
1) When you start typing in an ID number or place name, the app misses off the first two characters before it starts acknowleding what you're typing
2) Once you've selected a street name, the app "zooms in" on the location at such a low resolution that the street is lost in a large geographical area. Typing a street name in Glasgow results in most of Glasgow being visible and any charge points impossible to find. Try "Buchanan Street" in the app and see what I mean: in fact, if you've already zoomed into Buchanan Street manually, the app then zooms you back out to see all of Glasgow.
If not, tell them to fix these rookie errors first.
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