Last night I went for a little trip up country. This involved using the one and only toll road in the whole of NZ. Using this road makes me angry, firstly because toll roads are a crime against motorists who have already paid for the road through fuel taxes and so on, and secondly because the toll collection system was designed by a moron. Japan knows how to do toll roads. Obviously the people who designed the toll collection system got together and asked themselves "whats the most important thing to consider when you're fleecing motorists?" Answer...make it as painless as possible. While people may not like paying Y700 to go on the highway they tend to put up with it because it's easy. Just slow down, toss a few coins at the old dude in the box then mash the gas pedal to the floor and off you go. If that's a little too much like hard work you can eliminate the tossing and braking parts and get an ETC card which bills you electronically as you blast through the toll gate. While you are justified in moaning about the cost you can't complain that they make it difficult. Here in NZ it's totally the opposite. At $2, the toll to use the Northern gateway is a bargain. Great new highway, designer bridges, sculpted native bush, scenic landscape and a gleaming new tunnel make this a nice bit of road for very little money . Where it all comes crashing down is the hoops you must jump through to pay that money.
NZTA offers several ways to pay...all of which are a complete pain in the arse! You can use your mobile phone and a credit card but, as doing this while driving is illegal, you must exit the highway and stop. You could pay online but in order to do that you would have to find the internet so you must exit the highway and stop. You could also pay at the kiosks which are at either end of the toll road but as they are located some way off the road you must exit the highway and stop. Are you starting to see a pattern emerging here? It seems to have eluded the Muppet's in control of this road that the whole idea of a highway is that you do not have to stop for anything. I imagine they were possibly inmates of a mental institution and that the blueprint was drawn up on an big piece of cardboard using crayons. Obviously a electronic gadget geek was on the committee as was some faceless bureaucrat who saw the opportunity to do some empire building. As they were desperate to avoid having any human component in the system it was decided to provide a vending machine type thing to deal with those stick in the mud, flat earth types who insisted on paying with actual money. Not for us a simple grandad in a box to take your coins with a cheery greeting....we get a touch screen robot which, as all sci-fi geeks know, is way more efficient and cool. Except it isn't. What it is in fact is confusing and irritating. I used the kiosk last night and paid by the archaic method of putting a single gold coloured coin in a slot. This procedure involved exiting the highway and parking the car in a car park. I then had to exit the car and walk over to the kiosk where the machine is located. Next you wait in a line of equally annoyed and confused people. When you do get to the machine you discover that you need to know the registration number of your car to make this thing work. As the car park is quite large this tends to involve a lot of shouting as people scream out letters and digits to each other due to the fact that the cars number plate isn't actually visible form the kiosk. As you go to type in your reg number on the touch screen you will find that it doesn't work that well due to the last user having smeared grease all over it from a bucket of KFC that he was eating before he had to exit the highway and stop. After depositing your coin in the slot you are issued with a receipt...that is if the paper hasn't run out. Or the ink. Or that it just doesn't work. Which is what happened to me. Not only did this infernal machine swallow the first coin without crediting it, it refused to print out the reciept after the second coin was sacrificed. The next step it seems is to leave the receipt in the slot at the bottom of the machine. Throwing it on the ground also appears to be a popular choice judging from the amount of them littering the kiosk. Which is certainly better than having another useless piece of paper cluttering up the interior of your car. As you turn to leave you will inevitably be stopped by a confused European tourist and asked for instructions on how to work the damn thing. You are now free to continue your journey, or rather join the queue of cars waiting to continue their journey.
If this sounds like an awful lot of cocking about that's because it is. No wonder then that a large percentage of people using this road say to themselves "fuck all that!!" and just drive on through without stopping. This works particularly well if you are driving someone Else's car. A spy camera on a pole takes a nice picture of the car's number plate and you have 5 days to pay the toll by credit card. No bill is sent and most people forget to do it, caught up as they are on the treadmill that is modern life. This is where the bureaucratic evil empire swings into action. Admin fees are charged and reminders sent out. If you don't pay promptly the penalties skyrocket. If the driver of your car was not you but was in fact your cousin from Namibia for example, you can transfer liability to him. But only after you fill out a tedious form supplying his details to the toll Nazi's and and having it witnessed by a Justice of the peace. JP's are about as hard to find as rocking horse shit these days on account that nobody wants to do this thankless unpaid job. The ones that are willing tend to be about 70 years old and are available for witnessing statements for about 2 hours a day, usually between morning tea and lunchtime. Except Fridays as they have to tend to their rose garden. Or weekends as the grandchildren might be visiting. In short, if you're a 9 to 5 working stiff, you're screwed. Seeing as filling out forms and taking time off work to run around town looking for a JP, a 50c stamp, an envelope and a postbox is even more of a waste of your life, some people just pay the fine to make it go away. Others just ignore it until it gets passed on the the courts where it then wastes valuable time and resources. The admin and enforcement costs are so great that the road barely makes any money. The whole thing is a disaster from start to finish. So next time you come to a toll gate on the expressway say a big cheery Mai Do! (if in Kansai) to the grandad in the box and be satisfied in the knowledge that you're being robbed in the most efficient way there is all while staying firmly rooted in the past. Something Japan excells at.