The City of Phoenix should be proud of the efficiency of many of its services. Police and fire response times are low, and trash pickup is dependable. One area in which the City fails to meet its own service standards, however, is in shopping cart removal.

The Neighborhood Services Department encourages users to use the MyPhxAZ smartphone app to document abandoned carts. In theory, the app sounds great: Take a picture of the cart, enter some descriptive text, and have the report automatically geotagged based on GPS coordinates.

In actual practice, however, the app is incredibly buggy. Sometimes the photos taken within the app disappear before the report can be filed, and about half of the reports I attempt to submit result in cryptic error messages that only a programmer could understand or appreciate. Even in those cases in which a report is successfully submitted, it can take days to have the report acknowledged and even longer to have the cart removed. Clearly, this process is broken.

The City needs to look at different approaches to this problem, including the following possibilities:

1) A large number of carts are abandoned near bus stops and light rail stations. People shopping via public transit may use the carts to carry merchandise as far as possible before boarding a bus or train. Why not put cart return stalls at bus stops and rail stations that are near shopping centers?

2) Rebuild MyPhxAZ from scratch using experienced smartphone app developers. Make the app less sensitive to ampersands and commonly used symbols, and when error messages are necessary, make them intuitive to the end user.

3) Wheel locks may decrease cart theft, they also make it difficult to shop at multiple stores within the same shopping center without wastefully re-parking several times. When wheel locks are implelented, encourage use of the entire shopping center, rather than one retailer's perceived parking area, as the boundary.