By Serene Luo

VERY soon, senior account manager Kelvin Ng will no longer have to worry if his CashCard has enough money to pay the Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) road tolls.

Sick of having to pay the $10 or so fine once every three months that he would rack up, Mr Ng, 34, has decided to let his credit card take over the bills.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) had recently announced that ERP tolls can now be payable by linking a valid credit card to the car.

Users of the service will no longer need to slot CashCards into their in-vehicle units (IUs) when passing gantries.

The IU, however, stays to "communicate" with the gantry on the details of the charge so that the credit card can be billed.

By 5pm on the first day that the service was launched on Wednesday, 144 people had applied to link their credit cards to their cars.

At about 4.30pm yesterday, the number had swelled to 408.

Mr Ng, who tops up his CashCard with about $100 every week, spends two to three hours daily zipping between clients in his Toyota Wish.

"So when I woke up at about 6am on Wednesday, I immediately went online and signed up," he said.

He is now waiting for his application to be approved. He was not the earliest person to sign up. The LTA said the first application was logged at about 5am that day.

Kelvin Ng, a senior account manager, is one of the 144 people who signed up to get their cars linked to credit cards on the first day of the ERP Payment service, to pay their ERP bills.

Mr Ng also sent an e-mail to all his sales colleagues that day, urging them to sign up for the new service. The $2.50 monthly fee is a small price to pay for the convenience, he said.

But the service could be improved if it could include payment in carparks that use CashCard and gantries, some have pointed out on Internet forums.

Responding to The Straits Times' queries about this, the LTA said it would look into the possibility of extending payment by credit card using the ERP in-vehicle unit with other parties, for example, carpark operators.

Other forum users said the fee was too pricey for those who hardly drove through ERP gantries.

IT consultant Waqar Amin, 31, who was on the pilot scheme, and chalks up about $60 monthly driving through three gantries each day, agreed, but was pragmatic.

He said: "$2.50 pays for about 1.5 litres of petrol or one lunch. Would you rather pay $2.50 or get a $10 fine for going through the gantries without a CashCard?"

See also:
ERP payment with credit card

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Nov 8, 2008.

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