"Mizter T" wrote in message
...

On 06/11/2012 13:56, tim..... wrote:

"Mizter T" wrote:

On 05/11/2012 10:29, tim..... wrote:
[...]
well...

According to news out today, the system of collection will be "manual
post payment"

Quite frankly that sucks. In this era of modern technology that is
what
we should be using, not a Noddy system that we could have implemented
20
years ago.

How does it "suck", and how would you do it?

For those people who don't travel through often enough to have a DART
tag (and for those who didn't realise that they don't have enough
credit), having to actively make a phone call, or go online to pay, at
some point after you have driven through, sucks. Why does that need any
explanation?

I would make an automated post payment system for registered cars the
default option, that way you wouldn't have to make sure that your
pre-payment card:, a) had enough credit, b) hadn't expired due to lack
of use.

Why on earth are you so sure that this isn't going to happen?

Because there are no announcements saying so.

My reading of developments is that something just like you describe *is*
going to be implemented.

So why don't they say so then?

Free flow has been in planning for over 2 years now, and is still another
year away.

Why announce (now) a load of low tech, inconvenient, methods of paying if
you know that you are going to introduce a better one a few weeks later?

Note today's news:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/ar...ve-scheme.html

There is to be a coordinated national system of, guess what, post payment by
telephone with fines of 180 pounds for not phoning up to pay on time! [1] -
for Christ's sake!

I appreciate that this method won't work for 100% of customers but it
will work for 99%, unlike the options that they have made available.

I'm confused - are you talking about the present, or the future?

I'm talking about the principle of paying this way.

ISTM that if we are to have a database of registrations of car number plates
to credit/debit card accounts for post payment of tolls there should be one
national database for every toll that is collected (by a government agency)
this way (not a separate one for Dartford and another one for London CC
etc), so it will be easy for anyone who thinks that they might want to use
a tolled road somewhere in the country to know that they ought to register,
just in case.

So the only people who it won't work for a

a) people who want to cheat the system by driving through and not paying

b) A small section of the population who really didn't get to hear about it.

And as I've already said, I believe that once we have this database it
could/should be used for UK residents travelling on foreign tolled roads
also collected using this method, though I can see that we need some form of
protection here for cloned plates (and genuine mistakes) as I can't see it
being easy to persuade a CZ (for example) toll collected that your car
really was in the UK when they claim that you drove down their motorway

tim

[1] Yes I know, you can pay by internet instead,. It still isn't any more
convenient!