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. Or, for that matter, airline rewards currencies, which are distinct from money in being non-transferable. Such points schemes may seem a minor example, but they are far from trivial to airlines — to many they are the third most accepted currency after dollars and euros.
Which forces me to ask the question, why stop here? In the coming ‘post-bureaucratic age’, why can’t governments use smart technologies to create entirely new currencies in parallel to conventional money?
Let’s say you award everyone in London 300 transport units every year. If you want an on-street parking permit, this might cost you all 300 units (in addition to any annual fee). On the other hand, if you choose not to have a car at all, you would have 300 units to spend on joining a car club or using public transport.
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