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ON THE RIGHT ROAD
Page 9
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Barry Proctor welcomes the new pricing for the M6 Toll road. Because after all, the price was the only thing wrong with it..
As a lesson in how to manage the launch of a new product or service, the M6 Toll is a fine example of how not to do it.
Anyone and everyone within the haulage industry could have told its owners Midlands Expressway that attempting to make trucks pay £10 for a one-way journey was verging on commercial suicide (of course, if your aim is to discourage HGVs then it's a pricing structure that works, but that's a separate issue). To compound the error by repeatedly refusing to discuss how many trucks use the road I'm guessing that you could count them on the fingers of one hand smacks of arrogance and not a little disdain for the paying public.
Add to that a computer glitch presented as a "generous discount" in the form of lower charges for light commercials that MEL:s software couldn't recognise-and a refusal to discuss cutting rates despite extensive roadworks on the M6 and it does not come across as a company that puts customers before profits.
The great pity in all this is that despite the wrangles over the tolls, the actual road itself is a delight to drive on: it's quick, it's clear and it avoids the horrors of the regular M6. I've used it before at the wheel of both cars and coaches and have found it nothing other than a pleasure to use.
So the news that MEL has, for the time being at least, cut the toll rate for trucks is incredibly welcome; so much so that we signed up to its fleet scheme shortly after the price cut was announced.
"The actual road itself is a delight to drive on; it's quick, it's clear and it avoids the horrors of the M6"
In this area too I was pleasantly surprised in that it took just four days for MEL to process our ream of paperwork and deliver the tags for the trucks. Compare this with the performance of Transport for London, which managed to make signing up for the London Congestion Charge into the sort of tedious and long-winded process that gives bureaucrats a bad name.