Stupidity at the toll booth

Sant Cugat is conveniently connected to Barcelona via a set of toll tunnels. In a gesture to environmentalism, the tolls were reduced by 20% for 3+ occupancy vehicles a year or two ago. Is this enough to change anyone’s behavior? Probably not.

In any case, there is now a new policy that in order to get the discount, you need to have a “TeleTac”, which is a transponder that automatically debits your bank account. Exactly how this makes your car more environmentally friendly? No idea.

But now they seem to have a problem, which is that you can still push the discount button for a discount, even if you pay by credit card. The first solution was to tape a piece of cardboard over the button, but then people with the TeleTac couldn’t get the discount. So their next solution was to have two people standing next to the machine telling people (helpfully in Catalan) that they shouldn’t push the button if paying by credit card (but if you act stupid or start talking in pig-latin, you can confuse them long enough to push it quickly).

My suggestion was to make a small change to their billing software:

if (using teletec)
{
   apply discount
}
else
{
   don’t apply discount
}

Now that wasn’t too hard was it?