Recently I have had the pleasure of using the Northern Gateway Toll Road traveling North from Auckland. I like it because there are no toll booths, the collection is all electronic, the toll seems reasonable (at $2 per trip for a car), it is a nice piece of road, and it gets you where you are going faster than you could before.
They offer 3 methods of payment:
- A reasonably nice, easy to use online system (sure, it could be better, but it isn’t hard to use)
- Over the phone, via a free call 0800 number
- At toll ‘kiosks’ at either end of the toll road
For the operators of the Northern Gateway Toll Road, the New Zealand Transport Agency, surely the best of these option is for people to pay online. The more people paying online the less kiosks they have to have (I imagine that their electronic payment kiosks aren’t cheap to build, let alone ongoing maintenance and running), and the less staff they have to have in the call center.
With this in mind, why is there no discount to encourage online payment?
I bet that if they offered a 10% discount for online payment they would see a marked decrease in people choosing to use either the free phone option or the kiosks.
Bonus thought: Once you have registered your car license plate details and a contact email address why does the system not send you an automatically generated email asking you to pay your toll when it records a trip from your vehicle? They could probably cut their average days until collection down, and avoid pissing people off when they forget to log in and pay and their non-payment then becomes an offence.
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