3 Other ways to use your Snapper Card

I now have my Snapper Card and eagerly waiting to use it on the bus for the first time.

I still believe that Micropayments are due some further disruption where time and convenience would benefit from a payment card. My take on three candidates:

1. Taxi payment - not really a micropayment as typically fares will exceed $10 but this is included due to convenience. In a society where cash is no longer king you still need some to pay for your taxi home. You have the option of a credit card but you can't use EFTPOS. An ideal payment method would be the Snapper Card if the technology could be successfully integrated with the taxi itself. An extension of this would be a general rollout of GPS into cabs to help the drivers navigate around Wellington. If you combine GPS and Snapper properly you have a predictive cost tool based on point A to point B by road.

2. The cable car - in many ways integrated into the Wellington transport sphere enabling payment by Snapper must be a logical conclusion. I'm sure it's just a matter of time. As already posted here makng the GPS data from the buses available would be a real value added service. Make that available as a screen inside the cable car and allow commuters to see if they are able to connect to their bus service when they reach the bottom.

3. Short term parking - an ideal target for micropayments. Today you can request to have the parkign charges added to your Vodafone post-paid bill. This is fine if you're using post-paid but is a fire and forget service that you delay the payment for. If left in an uncontrolled way you could well get a nasty surprise when you get your phone bill at the end of the month. Allowing Snapper to be used to pay for parking still makes it a cashless transaction but gives the control to the consumer as they gt real time updates to their Snapper balance.