23/09/2008

Generally when the government steps in to remedy a problem it can be considered a bad thing. Simple reason is that governments tend not too be altruistic. In our particular case, we have a look at the M50 toll bridge. The government used taxpayers money to buy out what was essentially a modern day form of piracy and then hoisted the sail themselves and we have barrier free tolling. All sounds great except this came from a institution that has found itself with an 8 billion budget deficit to plug. This is not good news for us road users.

Basically we are putting tags on all short term hire vehicles. when the customer returns we will know the number of journeys made. With long term and lease customers we do not provide tags and the customer is responsible for getting a tag for m50 usage.

Update 02/02/2009.

As expected the tolling system is as bad as we expected and the deficit is 20 billion (worse than expected). We used the tag system for our vehicles for a number of reasons, primarily:

• Results in toll charges being 30% less for our customers ( yes, we do pass the saving on)
• Eliminate customers getting fines in the post
• Speed up journeys being made in our vehicles

   

However, things have not worked out as smoothly as we had hoped. The case of this is basically the shoddy implementation of the tolling system. The system only updates 2-3 times per day, so a lot of trips are not shown (we are currently bearing the costs of this). More worrying is the database that has been implemented. Think of trying to download a movie on an old 56k modem. This gives you an idea of the speed of the tolls database.

Here's an example, a customer has taken a vehicle for 2 weeks hire, vehicle is checked in, all is good and invoice is produced. This takes around 5 minutes. Then we go to check the toll tag, this can take up to 10 minutes to get the tolling details, depending on how busy the servers are. We do not find this acceptable, as it keeps customers waiting for longer than is necessary. We have contacted the tolling agents but the outcome does not look hopeful, as they have already been paid for the journeys, which is obviously their only concern.

As a result if the system is not improved by the end of march we will be de-tagging all vehicles and customers will need to ensure their tolls are paid. We would rather not do this, but the current system is essentially unworkable.