It has one face...
The Queen's.
QUIDOCALYPSE: Blighty braces for £100 MILLION cost of new £1 coin
As we predicted yesterday, it hasn't taken coin-guzzling machine operators long to kick off moaning about the cost of converting kit to accept Blighty's new 12-sided quid*, slated to hits the streets in 2017. The proposed 12-sided pound coin. Pic: The Royal Mint We suggested the retrofit bill for the old thrupenny-inspired …
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Thursday 20th March 2014 15:14 GMT monkeyfish
Re: £500 to update each parking machine?
Or remove them altogether. Your town centre shops will receive an up-tick in sales as a result of having more people willing to park. Said shops may then not go out of business, and empty shops may be re-filled. The council will receive money for having the shops, and not the parking.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 18:02 GMT Fonant
Re: £500 to update each parking machine?
Except if you make parking free then all the parking spaces will be filled all the time by people parking all day, so there won't be any parking available for shoppers. You need good turnover of parking spaces, ideally, so low cost for short periods, and much higher costs for people taking up a space for a long time.
One should also remember that the value of the land that a typical urban car park takes up is often extremely high: is it better to use it for parking cars, or do you build houses, flats, shops, or business premises on the land that generate more wealth for the local community?
In reality it's much better to make it easier for people to walk, bus, cycle, train to the shops. Cars are horribly inefficient ways of getting lots of people into a small area.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 20:53 GMT OldTimer1955
Re: £500 to update each parking machine?
"Except if you make parking free then all the parking spaces will be filled all the time by people parking all day..."
This canard is flown every time. It is nonsense. You don't let people park all day, you still time limit the parking, you just don't make them pay for it. ....numberplate recognition... in answer to the next question.
"Cars are horribly inefficient ways of getting lots of people into a small area."
No they are not. They are a very efficient way of moving a dispersed population into and out of a small area. We have run the experiment in real time. No more efficient method exists.
Town planners have to accept that people prefer (now need) to use their car to get from home to 'the shops'. Once they are in their car they can either go to the big box on the outskirts and park for free, or go to the town centre and pay through the nose to park. People are not perverse taken as a whole. If public transport was efficient it would be used, but it is systemically impossible to have efficient public transport with a dispersed population.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 23:08 GMT Don Jefe
Re: £500 to update each parking machine?
I reckon I have looked, 'academically' at the parking solutions in every large city on Earth. The only shared attribute is that they all suck. I like the idea of massive parking facilities, outside the city where you pick up an electric golf cart/bumper car and drive that into the city. If nothing else it would be fun.
Moving on, coins with flats on the edges completely disable one of the most clever, and inexpensive, theft/counterfeit protection systems ever invented. I have never seen a great solution to the not round coin issue either. False positives skyrocket with everything I've ever seen.
Have you ever tried to create a fake coin to put in a vending machine/arcade game? If you haven't, I'll just tell you it's really fucking hard to do. The most effective element in that system of protection, and the most difficult to fool, is the speed of the coin as it travels down the chutes. The speed of the coin, being a function of diameter and weight, is really, really tricky to bypass.
When you stick a coin in the slot, it is, effectively stopped for a fraction of a second (by a variety of different mechanisms) and the time is recorded from that point to another shortly after, to calculate speed. Incidentally, this mechanism is also what robs you of violent satisfaction after you shove the same fucking coin, into the slot for the 19th time with increasing force each time.
The speed test is the only, truly, dynamic validation check in the system. If you emasculate the system by eliminating that test, everything else is fairly easily bypassed with a little bit of measuring and weighing.
It's not I don't think effective countermeasures can't be created (they may already exist for all I know) but I really, really like the elegance of the speed test. That's just good engineering. Far, far more impressive, I think, than other, more complex alternatives.
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Friday 21st March 2014 11:30 GMT Wzrd1
Re: £500 to update each parking machine?
"If public transport was efficient it would be used, but it is systemically impossible to have efficient public transport with a dispersed population."
I'll call bullshit on that one.
Here near Philadelphia, PA, we have public transportation in extremely heavy use every single day of the week.
But, for elders, a motor vehicle is the way to go. It's hard enough getting into and out of one's own car, climbing onto a bus or train is a herculean effort in the extreme.
As for me, I tend to purchase a month's worth of groceries in one go. That is a non-starter if I were taking public transportation.
Each method of transport to its task, for each excels at their task. But, to go to "the shops", it's largely the motor vehicle that accomplishes the task.
With human parking enforcement excelling at enforcement.
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Friday 21st March 2014 13:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: £500 to update each parking machine?
@Fonant: "In reality it's much better to make it easier for people to walk, bus, cycle, train to the shops. Cars are horribly inefficient ways of getting lots of people into a small area."
However, cars are incredibly efficient ways of getting heavy shopping back home. Shopping is a two-way trip.
Good luck cycling back with your new TV / crockery set / duvet / etc.
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Friday 21st March 2014 18:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: £500 to update each parking machine?
"Good luck cycling back with your new TV / crockery set / duvet / etc."
Yes, a very good point. Getting a new TV home on your bike would be a bit tricky. Mind you, I think it's nearly twenty years since I last bought a crockery set. And probably twenty years before I buy another.
What I do is use one of these new-fangled "delivery services" that some retailers have started using in the last half century. I think most of them use vans, not bikes, these days.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 12:40 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: "it has 15 faces (12 bevels, obverse, reverse, outer edge)"
I count:
12 outer bevels - the 'sides'
12 inner bevels on each side
1 recessed face on each side
1 raised edge between the bevels on each side
Than makes a total of 40 faces, along with 96 edges and 72 vertices, if I count them all correctly.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 12:58 GMT FartingHippo
Re: "it has 15 faces (12 bevels, obverse, reverse, outer edge)"
Fair enough, but simplified to a dodecadonal prism then 14 is right. If you're going to be nerdy about it then you've missed quite a few radiused sections out (those corners aren't razor sharp) not to mention a boat-load of facets in the image.
I still maintain that the 15 in the article is correct under no reasonable interpretation.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 14:24 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: "it has 15 faces (12 bevels, obverse, reverse, outer edge)"
It seems to be a question of definition. Are we talking faces, facets, or planar surfaces? I would include the raised textual detail as well as the raised edge as planar surfaces but as they are merely parallel surfaces slightly raised or depressed they do not define a face or facet. The 12 internal bevels, presumably on each side, as well as the 12 edge surfaces would all be facets. I could go along with 14 faces including the two sides.
On a side note, I've been wishing the US would do a faceted edge on the $1 coin for years. They boned the S.B.A. dollar by dropping the hendecagonal edge and changing it to an internal design element around the standard ribbed circular edge and making it too close to the size of a quarter. I feel a faceted edge would have seen it be much more acceptable to the general public as it could be easily distinguished by feel alone. The latest one isn't bad but it would still benefit from a faceted edge.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 12:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Deal With It!
Coin and Note currency were developed for human to human payment for goods and services. Not as a token for electronic vending.
If you want to stick a machine out that accepts currency meant for human to human payment then it's up to you to foot the bill for adapting the machine to handle a new type of coin. Be thankful it's only a dodecagon, not something crazy like a triangle or square, Australia has a dodecagon 50 cent coin so the hardware already exists for the basic type of coin, not it needs to be adapted to the sizing.
In fact, a lot of modern coin acceptors will most likely work when put into a learning mode and a few coins pumped through and others a firmware update.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:23 GMT cyborg
Re: Deal With It!
" Be thankful it's only a dodecagon, not something crazy like a triangle or square"
That will never happen - coins must have constant width (i.e. if you rolled it then its height doesn't change, unlike a square or triangle) otherwise machines won't be able to deal with them correctly.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:34 GMT A Non e-mouse
Re: Deal With It!
Have a look at this Numberphile video on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUCSSJwO3GU. It discusses constant width shapes & solids.
(Numberphile is an excellent geek YouTube channel BTW)
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:47 GMT Anonymous Bullard
Re: Deal With It!
In fact, a lot of modern coin acceptors will most likely work when put into a learning mode and a few coins pumped through and others a firmware update.
Exactly.
Any coin-machine company that is run by people who are old enough to work will know that the size/shape/weight of coins is not static. If the "whole" machine needs to be scrapped and replaced, then unfortunately that's their own fault for being so short-sighted.
At most, the slot/coin mechanism will need replacing. They make these things interchangeable so they can be sold to different countries.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 14:38 GMT TitterYeNot
Re: Deal With It!
"In fact, a lot of modern coin acceptors will most likely work when put into a learning mode and a few coins pumped through and others a firmware update."
Well, they'll work until you're having a really bad day, you're running late, there's a queue for the machine behind you, and it's your very last coin, and then the thing's guaranteed to go straight through the bloody machine into the reject slot again and again and again...
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Thursday 20th March 2014 16:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Deal With It!
Well, they'll work until you're having a really bad day, you're running late, there's a queue for the machine behind you, and it's your very last coin, and then the thing's guaranteed to go straight through the bloody machine into the reject slot again and again and again...
That's actually the critical mission detector, and it's the very reason these things get upgrades. Some features must be kept in working order..
/sarcasm
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Thursday 20th March 2014 17:02 GMT swampdog
Re: Deal With It!
@TitterYeNot
Can I employ you to stand behind me in queues? That should ensure it doesn't happen to me. On second thoughts it may only reduce the chance to 50/50 but now that I'm getting my cynical head switched back on, it will likely double the chance.
You've just done yourself out of a job - which kinda reinforces your original point!
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Friday 21st March 2014 00:00 GMT Martin Budden
Re: Deal With It!
Australia has a dodecagon 50 cent coin so the hardware already exists for the basic type of coin
Except that most Australian parking meters don't accept 50c coins, they only accept the round ones. Cos validating a dodecagon is a right
royalrepublican pain in the arse.(Icon is an octagon not a dodecagon, but it's the closest icon there is)
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Thursday 20th March 2014 12:35 GMT Chris Miller
Coin-operated trolleys are mechanically very simple - they're not collecting money, just giving you an incentive to return the trolley. Any object vaguely similar in size and shape to a £1 coin (€1 or even a suitable washer) will work equally well.
Coin operated ticket machines, dispensers of snacks/condoms, etc. will require much more careful adjustment or even replacement.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 12:51 GMT Loyal Commenter
Coin recognition
I would imagine this works by mesauring up to three things:
1) The size of the coin
2) The weight
3) The shape
For 1, I can't see this being more difficult than changing the size of a slot in a metal plate, through which the coin does, or does not fall. Cost - pennies for the part, 5 minutes labour to fit.
For 2, This will either be done by a balancing mechanism, or more likely electronically, so a simple software update is the most probable route. Cost - for the development required probably negligable per device, considering the number of devices, and the manufacturing and labour costs of swapping out a control circuit. One would hope that these have been designed so that they can be updated and re-used.
For 3, well we already manage to accept 20p and 50p coins, which in case people hadn't noticed are also polygonal, not round.
I think the figure of £500 to update each parking meter is vastly over-inflated. Given economies of scale, and the labour costs involved in physically updating machines, it's probably closer to £5, if that.
Edit - A quicki google tells me that modern vending machines also distinguish coins by their magnetic signature, which would appear again to be a software update issue.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Coin recognition
"I think the figure of £500 to update each parking meter is vastly over-inflated. Given economies of scale, and the labour costs involved in physically updating machines, it's probably closer to £5, if that."
Hold on, in the world of PFI and outsourcing there's always two costs - the activity based costing that is the costs incurred by the party that does the deed, and a separate, totally unrelated cost, that is the invoice value to the customer. That cost is what they will record on their accounts payable ledger, and is driven by simply the highest value the supplier can persuade or force the customer to pay.
Are you arguing that the entropic forces that keep those two costs in separate universes can be overcome, and that the parking meter owners might actually pay something like true activity based cost plus 30% gross margin? If you are, then you're barking.
What will happen is that councils etc will pony up because they've no choice (other than to rip out parking meters and pay machines), but then they'll use that as an excuse for a vastly above inflation increase in parking charges. And as night follows day, they'll continue wringing their hands complaining that nobody visits their crappy town centre any more, and its all the fault of the out of town supermarkets.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:06 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: Coin recognition
Cost of a label saying 'this machine does not yet accept the new £1 coin'? Pennies.
The old coins will be around for years - in most cases, the lifetime of the machine. At that time, they can be replaced with updated machines which will accept the new but not the old coin.
Hundred million my arse.
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Friday 21st March 2014 00:12 GMT Martin Budden
Re: Coin recognition
I would imagine this works by mesauring up to three things:
1) The size of the coin
2) The weight
3) The shape
...
For 3, well we already manage to accept 20p and 50p coins, which in case people hadn't noticed are also polygonal, not round.
The thing about the 20p and 50p coins is they don't have straight sides, they have curved sides. Very carefully worked out curves: if you measure the diameter of the coin, you always get exactly the same result, no matter what the rotation of the coin.
The thing about the proposed new dodecagon coin is it has straight sides, which completely buggers up the measurement of the diameter.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: ROI
"saving themselves £40m per year in fraud"
I've found one of the most reliable ways of detecting forged pound coins is to put them in machines - the ones that aren't accepted are almost always forged, although you wouldn't notice on casual handling. And if the machine gives change for notes, the chances are that any forgeries good enough to pass the machine will be paid out as change.
I don't believe it costs the BPA anything like £40m a year. If it'll pass for real in your hand, and if the machine test indicates it is real, what are the chances they won't be able to bank it?
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Thursday 20th March 2014 12:58 GMT JimmyPage
Maybe this will incentivise operators
to stop taking ****ing coins. Maybe I am an odd minority, but because I rarely use cash, I don't have a pocketful of assorted coins available at the drop of a hat. I'm less bothered by vending machines, but parking machines are the worst.
Big up for RingGo here, who run the parking at my local station (Warwick Parkway) and let you pay by card, via a phone call. And QPark who run the parking at the new QE in Brum. They take cards too. Very helpful when you have to rush your son into A&E at no notice, and have no cash.
And don't get me started about machines that don't give change - if I ever have any time left on a ticket I always try to give it to a new arrival.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:33 GMT dotdavid
Re: Maybe this will incentivise operators
I don't mind the RingGo thing, it's probably a cheap way for parking operators to add card payments with the minimum of hassle. It also allows you to "top up" your parking if you're running late or whatever without having to return to the machine. The transaction fees are annoying though, as is the requirement to speak to someone over the phone or text your registration plate with a carpark identifier code whenever you want to park if you don't want to register with them (or use their app). Still, it beats Pay and Display.
Our local large town operates a kind of chip coin scheme which is probably the best way I've seen - take a small yellow plastic coin when you enter the car park, stay as long as you like, and insert it into a payment machine (which takes cards) when you return to pay for your parking. The coin's issued timestamp tells the machine how much you owe and you get a certain amount of time to leave the car park after paying. That sort of system means no faffing around with phone numbers, apps or codes and registration and you only pay for the time you use.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 14:50 GMT Corinne
Re: Maybe this will incentivise operators
"And don't get me started about machines that don't give change - if I ever have any time left on a ticket I always try to give it to a new arrival."
Doesn't work round my way at the Council car parks - they've all switched over to the ones where you have to put your car registration number into the machine & it's printed onto the ticket. Bearing in mind that to park for anything over 4 hours there currently costs £6.50 (it's £2 or less for under that, not exactly central London out here in the sticks) I think that's a tiny bit stingy.
Then again, half the machines went through a phase of not liking 50p pieces a while back, and whenever the Treasury slightly reduce the weight of coins - both 10p and 5p are definitely thinner than they used to be, visibly so in the case of 10p - then the parking machines always take weeks or months to catch up.
And they still don't take £2 coins either (sigh)
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Thursday 20th March 2014 13:01 GMT DaLo
Risk Management?
Surely in the risk register of the company designing the coin-collecting machine there was a section about coins changing and how to mitigate this risk.
It's not as if coins haven't changed many times before, and we already have non-round coins (20p, 50p) and also bi-metallic coins (£2). Therefore it can't have been beyond reason to expect that a machine, during it's lifetime may need to recognise new coins and if it costs £500 to do it then they obviously haven't planned for it very well (or just decided to take the hit).
In reality it will be many years before the old £1 goes out of circulation after the new one is introduced so the transition period will be quite long.
However, parking machines in many a car-park can't even give out change even though they can request you fill in your full car reg (oh yeah, one makes them more money, the other stops them losing money).
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Thursday 20th March 2014 20:22 GMT Sooty
Re: Risk Management?
In reality it will be many years before the old £1 goes out of circulation after the new one is introduced so the transition period will be quite long.
I've been trying to remember how long the 5, 10 and 50p hung around after the "new" ones came out, it didn't feel like too long a time, nor the £20 note. Change tends to end up in shops and machines in bulk and should get swapped out fairly quickly. While they will be around for a long time it shouldn't be too long before they are a novel rarity rather than something generally used.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 19:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
How exactly does this prevent counterfeiting?
How many years/decades will the old pound coins still be accepted by vending machines and bartenders? The US has introduced several new generations of $100 bills to fight counterfeiting, but the old bills are still accepted and I still get them back at casinos sometimes when I cash in my chips. I think banks may remove them and trade them to the Fed for new bills and destroy the old ones, but a lot of $100 bills circulate around without ever reaching a bank.
If I want to counterfeit pound coins, I'll counterfeit the old ones and the new ones will be irrelevant. It will take a long time to remove them from circulation if what I see with the $100 bill is any lesson (and I'm talking about bills really within circulation in the US - the bulk of US currency probably circulates outside the US.
Likewise, someone counterfeiting $100 bills would obviously target the old style ones from the 80s, give them a nice worn look, and mix them in a stack of $100s when buying chips in the casino to "launder" them. The blackjack dealer just stuffs them down a chute without checking them. Another good way to launder them is to mix them in with bundles of 100s used to make an overseas drug buy. The drug dealer isn't putting that money in the bank, so he probably doesn't "care" too much if they're counterfeit, so long as they'll pass when he's buying whatever drug lords buy with the bales of cash they end up with.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 20:51 GMT Sooty
Re: How exactly does this prevent counterfeiting?
When the £20 note was replaced, the new ones were visually very different and people were given 3 months before the old ones were no longer legal tender and accepted in shops. UK notes tend to be a lot more differentiated than US ones, so you can't really put a few in a stack after they have left general circulation without raising a few eyebrows.
With these also being clearly, visually, different I wouldn't be surprised if a similar thing happened and the old ones were given a sharp cutoff. I think only a month's notice is actually required, and should be plenty of time to swap a normal amount over. If you have buckets full of the things it might be harder, but most people don't tend to have more than a few before using notes.
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Friday 21st March 2014 02:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How exactly does this prevent counterfeiting?
Three months? Wow! Totally different than in the US. AFAIK, they have never made a legal tender note no longer legal tender, they rely on interception/replacement by the Treasury.
The newer US $100 bills are quite different than the old ones, but everyone is so used to seeing them it wouldn't raise an eyebrow having them in a stack. If I withdraw $1000 from my bank in cash and they give me 10 hundreds, they are rarely all the same type.
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Thursday 20th March 2014 23:07 GMT John Tserkezis
Cynical Brits might suspect that "lowest possible cost to industry" is a euphemism for "at consumers' expense".
Nothing cynical about it. Here in Australia, they've converted everything up to $2 into coins, and there was some (perhaps not yet serious) talk of a $5 coin.
To pay for it, the councils stopped injecting their parking inspectors with the now obsolete Wanker Serum (TM), and started with injections of Cunt Serum (TM)(1). Many councils have also issued new uniforms that if you didn't quite look twice, could be mistaken for standard issue Police uniforms. The parking inspectors for some time are demanding more rights to be protected against locals who are now abusing them, and not just verbally.
As far as vending machines go, all coin firmware has been upgraded with "Coin Eating Technology" (patent pending), which randomly eats coins and refuses to admit it injested anything. At the same time, huge signs were installed alerting the now hungry or thirsty users to a phone number they can call (without actually promising anything). Then IF you get a successful connection, it'll be a press "1 for this" menuing system that is so convoluted that you'll give up before getting anywhere. Which leads me to the next cost-saving venture - by far fewer phone boxes:
Public phones are a non-issue. They have all been progressively rolled back (even if you could find one that actually worked). Now that the 60+ population (the last of the die-hards who still used phone boxes), now have their own cell phones - there's no need anymore. Privately-owned-publically-used blue and gold phones have entirely vanished altogether, again for the same reason, and it doesn't help they were always placed outside shops that also sold cheap prepaid cellphone cards and recharge slips.
So there you go, these are several suggestions on how the recoining costs could be absorbed by the industry(2).
(1) Term is used entirely in the derogatory sense, and has no bearing of the same word used to describe a particular body part, or any other part of its owner, especially not the owner's mother. Also, the serum is actually fictional, the councils actually use behaviour modification to achieve desired results (sign more fines or you lose your job).
(2) Rort the customer.
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Friday 21st March 2014 09:37 GMT DrXym
I really don't see any problem here at all
I assume the basic dimensions of the coin will be shortly available meaning any supermarket trolley being made today could be future proofed for 2017 by the simple expedient of providing two slots - some supermarket trolleys take a euro or a pound so it's entirely possible. How long does a trolley last anyway?
As for vending machines - coins and notes change all the time and most machines are reprogrammable. I don't see how a new coin would pose a problem since the firmware can be updated when the machine is serviced.
The UK shouldn't find itself in the US situation where their banking and vending machines industries made such terrible assumptions about the size and shape of their currencies that it is virtually impossible to change. Look at the collective hair pulling that goes on over there whenever they try to introduce a dollar coin.
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Saturday 22nd March 2014 21:01 GMT John Savard
Forty!
If we avoid counting the faces created by the raised lettering on the obverse and the faces created by the incised microprinting, because that way lies madness, such as counting two faces for each milled grove, then I count 40 faces. 12 sides on the edge of the coin. On each face, there's one face with a hollow center. Inside that, there are 12 sloping facets with the microprinting. Then there's the actual obverse or reverse of the coin. So it's 12 plus two times 12+1+1.
However, looking at the picture of the coin lying down in the other article, it may have had another 48 faces that I neglected, since the angled faces seem to have vertical faces above and below them in that position.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
