Tolls that have to be paid online

[Fianceechickie]

We live nearish the new Mersey bridge in Runcorn. You can't pay there and then, there are no booths and you have to remember to go online and pay when to get home. Is it me, or is that a neat way of money grabbing? Cheap for the operator who doesn't have to put in toll booths and people are bound to forget, being tired, busy, other things to do and they can just fine you then. DH been fined twice in the last few months having forgotten to pay the £2 when he gets home on evenings he's used it. On one occasion he paid for one trip that same day but forgot he'd driven across it again. You can set up an account but there's a £10 fee and £20 minimum top up. I've seen this on roads in Ireland too. I've not used it because I just know i would forget to pay!

nobody from younger generations will have grown up unfamiliar with the internet or unwilling to do simple things like online banking

More meta than that, they will have grown up familiar with the idea that things change, and that they need to revisit how they do things. People in their forties weren't "brought up" with a lot of the technology they used, but we don't see forty year olds posting about how they weren't taught to use an iPhone at school and therefore can't be doing with this new technology.

I'm not sure I agree with either of you. Lemon the pace of change seems to be accelerating, so by the time the younger generations are in their 80s they'll be having to cope with changes larger than today's 80 year olds are coping with.

cuboid I think there's something to do with the total amount of change you've accommodated. The elderly gentleman I referred to earlier, in his 40s was embracing all sorts of things that weren't around when he was at school, television, for example. Freely available electricity. Central heating. Motorways. His capacity for change is now less. It's not stubbornness or choice. Maybe it's lack of confidence because he knows his faculties are declining? Or maybe it is simply that the world is so different from the one he grew up in?

Actually just came across something in relation to cheques. Only 7% of donations to charities are made online. The vast majority are made by post and by cheque. That is because it is mainly older people who give to charity. So charities certainly would not want cheques to be obsolete as their donations would fall.

I am mid 50s. In my first office job we had no computer, we wrote everything by hand and any letters that need typed went to the secretary. Lots of paper records and filing was important.
I remember activists still designing posters using letraset. At the college library you found books using a card index, and some old documents were on microfiche. Video recorders were a new thing and there were lots of jokes amongst adults about needing your children to set them as they were so difficult to master.
Nobody had mobile phones or TVs with more than 4 channels. Many people still bought TV guides every week. Lots of people still did not use cash machines and benefits and pensions were collected in cash from the post office.
Even very early adopters like my brother who had the very first computers, only used it at home as a hobby but never saw one at work.
Then most people never used any technology except a TV or radio and for early adopters, a video recorder. That was it. So yes the pace of change had been enormous. And as you get older it does get harder to learn to use, not impossible but it does take longer.

You'd type "using London buses" into Google
Why would someone who's used buses alone since the 70's even think to look up how to use a bus, it's a bus I had assumed it is used like it's always been used around here. You get on and pay (exact change).
Now I know it isn't and I will have to look up paying for the bus while we are there.
Dd is 13 I'll do some googling and find out about an oyster card for visitors or maybe I'll cut my losses, buy a hop on hop off pass for some sigt seeing or get a black cab

I am mid 50s.

So am I. Next?

And people like me will be working for at least another 12 years full time, so hardly the older generation.
You want people to embrace online banking? Then make it easier for people to sue. Set up security measures so once people have registered the name of who they are sending money to and the numbers have to match up. Or even have a paper set up in branch of all the people they will be sending money to and get the cashier to check this. Allow more time for people registered to need this - time out is a big issue for some people. Make all employers run a session teaching people how to use it.
You need to understand why some people are resistant. You obviously don't.

Cuboidal Then I would expect you to understand more. The issue obviously then is just your extreme arrogance.

Only 7% of donations to charities are made online. The vast majority are made by post and by cheque

31% are made by direct debit.

Why would someone who's used buses alone since the 70's even think to look up how to use a bus, it's a bus I had assumed it is used like it's always been used around here.

So this thread has at least saved one person a problem.

Visitor Oysters are a waste of time. Your 13 year old probably has a contactless payment card anyway, otherwise just buy an ordinary Oyster card when you arrive. Top tip: cash buses will be dead in all major cities within a decade.

meredinto The 63% who use online banking figure means they used it once in the last 3 months. I am part of that figure. Bollocks do I do most banking online. I get cash from the cashpoint, pay in cheques sent as presents by older relatives to my branch and get paper statements sent every month that I actually check, which cuboidal thinks makes me weird.

And I do wonder where some of you live that getting cash out is so difficult. There is a cash machine outside most large supermarkets. It takes a few minutes to withdraw.

I do think banks are refusing to address online banking issues to make it easier and make it less likely that people will make mistakes.

Incidentally the voluntary organisation who will only do handwritten minutes is an extreme example. What is more common is charities with paid staff using new technology. Very active Trustees who give lots of time - only those who don't work have the time for this so they tend to be retired. So cheques are used because that is what they prefer. And as I said above, the majority of donations made to charities are by post and either direct debit forms or cheques.

And I have 4 different bank branches within a 5 minute walk from me. When I walk by, all always seem to be busy. Some have went to using machines in branch, others favour counters.

What would get more people using remote banking is offering better telephone banking. First Direct excel at this. Telephone banking avoids some of the problems that many people face using online banking. My mum would be fine with this. Her tremor means she can no longer use a laptop. But queues need to be short, and operators need to have easily understood accents and understand strong british accents and people who may have a slight slur from a stroke.

cuboidal The 31% made by direct debit is pushed up by chuggers. Charities will never abandon cheques when they still get many donations through this route. Most donations are given in response to direct mail and are given by older people.
The majority of one off donations are made by cheque.

When I travel in London I see more people using oyster cards than contactless. I use contactless.

That's simply not true. The paying bank knows who the collecting bank is, and will tell the authorities on request.

don't be picky, you (of all people on this thread) know what I meant.

If I wanted to keep my bank details from you, a cheque from you is the only way to do it. As far as I know absent any accusations of fraud you would have no right to know what bank account/sort number it was paid into. Even if there were to be an allegation of fraud, the bank would not be able to divulge that to me.

Currently we have nothing to replace that feature.

meredinto The 63% who use online banking figure means they used it once in the last 3 months. Yes, I quoted the figure more to demonstrate that more than 1 in 3 of us does no online banking at all.

I must say I share troel's bewilderment that to visit London, my own capital city, and a city that I worked in for over 20 years, I need to do the same research about how to get around that I would do for travel in a foreign country.

If I wanted to keep my bank details from you, a cheque from you is the only way to do it.

Paypal. PingIt (requires only mobile phone number, I think).

I'm also not quite sure that I want to do business with someone who won't tell me their bank details, but insists on receiving mine (because they're printed on the face of the cheque). Why would I agree to this? Why are their bank details secret, even though they're the ones getting the money, while mine aren't, even though I'm the one transferring it? This smacks of another of those "aha! cheques do this thing no-one actually wants, what about that then?" scenarios.

When I travel in London I see more people using oyster cards than contactless. I use contactless.

You can't load a season onto a contactless card, so everyone with a season ticket has to use Oyster. When it first rolled out there was a noticeable lag in opening the gates with contactless compared to Oyster, although that seems to have been fixed. For an occasional user who has contactless and doesn't already have an Oyster card with auto-topup set up, there's no point in starting to use Oyster. For regular users, it's more balanced.

And with respect to visitors, I have used contactless Oyster-alikes in a bunch of foreign cities, mostly in Asia but also in the US (Paris has one, but it's some weird local card for local people that requires filling out forms in triplicate and getting them stamped by the marie, the boulangerie and Sasha Distel before you can get one). They make public transport usable by a visitor in a way that cash transactions in unfamiliar currency simply aren't, and also make "whoops, I got on a bus and didn't get off at my stop, my ticket isn't valid, hello nice Mr inspector" less scary, too. As "but what about the visitors" is another popular "it's all so terrible" meme, am visitor to cities with card transport payment, use buses far more than I did when they were cash.

meredinto Ah okay, I hadn't realised. Yes that is a lot of people who have not even done the minimum. My DP is one. He gets worried about putting in the wrong account code so wont use it. He has just changed banks as the branch moved, so he wanted a branch that was easy to get to.

Anyway you can still buy a top up oyster card, so people do use them. Dual systems like that I am fine with. Incidentally how do you use a contactless card with say 3 kids? Presumably you cant?

Dual systems like that I am fine with. Incidentally how do you use a contactless card with say 3 kids?

Children under 10 (11?) travel free without further proof.

Children over that age who live in London (and some surrounding places) are entitled to a Zip Card.

Children over 12 can, and increasingly do, have a contactless card.

Otherwise they'll need an Oyster Card. Which you can buy at newsagents, stations, from machines, by post, pretty much every retail channel imaginable. If it's a one-off visit, the difference between a child fare and an adult fare is the price of a Twix, so in extremis they just use an adult Oyster.

London's buses work quite well. You haven't been able to pay with cash for a couple of years now. Which makes one think that overall, the far faster boarding and lack of cash handling on the bus outweighs the small amount of adaptation that some edge case travellers might have to make. Public transport really is a case of the needs of the many outweighing the preferences of a few.

I do not live in London.

And where I live all the buses still take cash. It works fine. The private companies even give change.

I do not live in London.

Nor do I. I'm not sure what point you're making.

The info for child visitor Oyster cards is here if it helps anyone.

tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/travel-for-under-18s/travelling-with-children

And at the risk of repeating what people have already said in a cancel the cheque style,

You can pay on the phone or in a payzone shop

The point is that we would still need to buy oyster cards for kids, although I had forgotten younger children got travel free.

I agree with post above that people keep using the systems they are used to, unless they have a reason to change. I will continue to get cash out from the cashpoint when I go to supermarket once a week. And make a trip to my branch to pay in a birthday and xmas cheque from elderly relatives. I use contactless for travel in London because of the queues to buy an oyster card, have direct debits set, up, get a monthly paper bank statement and use online banking for international payments - because doing it any other way is a nightmare with banks. It is all easy, so why would I change it?