If you have used Oxford railway station recently, you may have noticed a strange electronic sign on the up platform displaying a ‘parking code’, a seemingly random three-digit number. I wondered about this and asked around.
It seems that, when parking next to the station, you can either ‘pay and display’, in which case you pay a kind of rip-off-the-clueless-tourists hourly rate, or else you can pay by mobile phone. By including the ‘parking code’ when you call (it can only be seen from the platform, and hence is known only to those with train tickets) you pay much less. It’s a system of discrimination where there’s one price for rail travellers and another for everyone else — you could call it aparkheid.
This is just one case of technology challenging our assumptions about pricing. Another is the Oyster Card, which now intelligently refunds you once you have spent more on journeys in a day than the cost of an equivalent travelcard.
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