Salik: anything but connected.
However, the recent introduction by Dubai's Roads & Transport Authority (RTA) of its controversial new road toll has been anything but connected. In Dubai, the most internet-connected city in the Middle East, the RTA has chosen to receive the applications of its 600,000 motorists through the time-honored Arabic bureaucratic method of duplicate paper forms and photocopies instead of using that most connected of mediums: the internet.Here's how it works: in order to obtain a Salik tag, a Dubai motorist has to visit a gas station armed with AED 100 in cash and a photocopy of both sides of their "mulkiyeh" (registration card). They then need to fill in a form, a carbon copy of which is then retained by the gas station attendant for processing by RTA.>/p>
Now, this is where the fun begins. As of July 1, the first day of the toll's implementation, only 160,000 of Dubai's more than 640,000 motorists had successfully applied for their Salik tags. Braving the snarling traffic jams that then engulfed the city, RTA's brave men and women then managed to distribute another 400,000 Salik tags to Dubai's beleagured (and lazy) motorists who had not yet registered for their tags.
And now, in order to put everything into place, the RTA now has to manually enter at least 560,000 application forms into their database in order to get the system properly up and running.
Fuck me, that's a whole lot of paperwork, and whole lot of needless effort.
Here's a nifty suggestion for next time. Instead of swamping their army of data-entry operators with more than half a million applications, why not get the people of Dubai to do their work for them?
What they should have done is made it mandatory for everyone to apply online. Apart from being a bold nod to Sheikh Mohammad's vision of Dubai's 21st centry status, it would have also spared the RTA the now mountainous task of dealing with hundreds of thousands of bits of paper.
It would have worked: the UAE is the most connected country in the Middle East, with an Internet penetration of over 50%. In Dubai, the figure is probably closer to 65% (note: unofficial YTT estimate). Users could have then entered all their information online, received a unique identifier code, which they could then have taken to the gas stations in order to receive their tag. The attendants could then activate their applications by either connecting to an extranet or by calling a toll-free number with Interactive Voice Response (like the one your banks have).
For the few people who were not able to successfully hunt down an internet-connected computer, the RTA could have either charged them an extra AED 100 for the inconvenience of the paperwork, or created Internet kiosks for them to apply through.
Easy, huh?
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