NOTES FROM BIG BEN
Customer Service? I Don’t Think So
By Peter Guest
I live about 50 km out of the center of London. The train in is 40 minutes in comfort; the drive is about 90 minutes of misery. The local railway station carpark is charged using pay-and-display machines, and I expected to feed in a few coins and collect my ticket in about 30 seconds. Wrong! Someone in the train company who thinks the first two
words of the headline on this column are some kind of offensive remark had had a bright idea: “Let’s take out the coin payment option and replace it with a shiny new machine that will accept only credit cards.” (Well, they actually do accept cash as well, but this option had been taken out.) “That way we don’t have to collect the cash, and so we save loads of money.”
Now all credit card transactions have to be validated and grown-up businesses do this in real-time, taking a second or two at the most. But that costs more because the machines have to be networked.
There is a cheaper option,
used by my local butcher and people selling candles at a craft fair, and that is dial-up. Each time a credit card is used, the system dials in to the central computer, and after making a connection, gets a validation. Problem is that this takes a zillion times as long. So here I am at one of the
The truth is out there – somewhere
Two articles on the same day on the same page of a magazine recently caught my eye.
Article 1 was a report from Northern Ireland on the contract there to manage the province’s on- and off-street public parking. It told us that the £22.5m raised in fines last year was insufficient to cover the £36.1m paid to the contractor that enforces the system, even though the number of tickets issued went up by 8%. A government spokesman from the Department of Regional
Development (remember this, you’ll need it later) then waffled on how it’s not about the money and reduced illegal parking and the benefits of reduced congestion and greater road safety blah blah blah.
In the UK, we have more than 2 million people looking for a job. Why has this person still got his?
busiest commuter stations in the UK with 500 spaces, in the rain, and each “dial-up” payment is taking nearly two minutes to process. Brilliant! It got even more exciting a few days later when the train
company’s system crashed and no one could pay. That probably cost them almost as much as the “saving” by choosing the wrong system.
In the UK, we have more than 2 million people looking for a job. Why has this person still got his?
•••
Article 2 had Danny Kennedy, the Minister for Regional Development (did you remember what I told you?), announcing that parking fines would be going up by 50% to combat a rise in illegal parking.
So, let me get this right. They
can’t find enough people parked illegally to generate enough money to pay for the enforcement, but that doesn’t matter because of the social gain. But there is so much illegal parking that the fine has to go up to stop it. I’m confused, but I am
sure that it’s not about making money – that would suggest that politicians are cynical and opportunistic. Oh, Mr. Kennedy also gave an undertaking that they will not roll out charges to free, on-street parking in 30 towns in the province. If I were selling parking meters, I know where I would be heading.
••• Too smart to buy a pig in a poke
You’d think that the UK city with the biggest parking operation in Europe would run a pretty tight ship, so when Westminster decided to off-load its carparks to the private sector, we knew it would be interesting.
50 Parking Today
www.parkingtoday.com
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