Rich deal, poor service

In a period of time when people need to fully know the several issues of parking and rising rates, after a new parking concession was conceded to a different company, and when the infrastructure works and tens of other works are cutting hundreds of available parking spots creating a daily nightmare for the regular citizen, many other bottlenecks tell us again why public services should be awarded after an international tender.
It is nice to want to attribute to local businesses, but when concerned, the public welfare legitimacy can be called into question.
What is beginning to be worrying are the anomalies in the new machines of the parking meters. In addition, it seems the customers must alert the service company if a certain meter is not working.
Yesterday, as this paper could verify, the meter 4231 was inoperative. The users had to warn the concessionaire so that they did not run the risk of being fined and their vehicles blocked a couple of hours later.
The machine would eventually be arranged but by late afternoon it was only coin operated and not with the Macau Pass card, a more practical system. One of the users called back but not mastering the Chinese language was unable to alert who was on duty at the company. No one there spoke Portuguese or English — as if Macau was a lost village in Qinghai province. A kind of Chengbeihou and villages like it at 9,000 feet up in the mountains.
With tens of thousands of foreigners residing in Macau – despite the international language being treated poorly – and a second official language, Portuguese, the result of treaties between two states and protected until 2049 by the Macau SAR mini-constitution – the government continues to award concessions to companies without ensuring that they respect at least common sense. After all, it’s almost impossible to say that they are not respecting the contracts if these continue to be kept away from the public knowledge. Which allows speculations that might be but pleasing to the transparency of administrative procedures.
Some might argue that a newspaper editorial is a bit too strong for a simple parking meter case. But it is not the machine that is important to note. It is the example, one of many, hundreds, thousands, which shows how deficient the system still is. Though so much money changes hands. Or maybe because of exactly that…