Many thanks to Carlo for holding things together while I was away for the last two weeks on holiday. I’ve been on an activity holiday, doing stuff like canyoning (that’s me on the right), white water rafting and kayaking. Sounds rather macho, except that everything I did, my kids did too.

On a more tech front, the thing that did strike me was the different approach the various countries we drove through took to how they charged for using their roads (we drove down to Croatia and Slovenia).

In Germany, despite being the corridor to Southern Europe for most of Northern Europe, it’s free to drive through. Rather generous or short-sighted, depending on your view of the huge environmental damage done.

Austria charges a fixed fee for a licence, or “Vignette” for non-domestic cars, which costs Euro 7.60 for 10 days and which you attach to your windscreen. Low tech, but effective, though you do need to police it - and boy, do they police it, with hefty fines handed out to transgressors. A Vignette is pretty easy to buy, with most shops and gas stations near the border selling them.

Slovenia again doesn’t charge.

Croatia and Italy both use the highest tech solutions and as a result cause absolute chaos on their roads and huge traffic queues for the hapless drivers, domestic and non-domestic alike. To use a major road, they charge a toll (per kilometre) and every driver has to queue up at a toll booth to get a ticket (or sometimes pay in advance on small stretches) and again to pay at the end. There’s no way out of this and it’s not unusual based on my experience to have to wait for 3 or more hours at this time of the year to get through ONE toll alone to pay a few Euros.

This is just crazy, as tourism is very important in both countries and the motorist’s overwhelming memory is of a road system that resembles a car park, caused entirely artificially to gather a series of little tolls.

You could, of course, argue that this serves the selfish, polluting motorist right and this would be fair if there was another practical way of travelling. But European rail is expensive and slow, flying is more polluting anyway and there simply isn’t another way to travel 500+ kilometres with family and luggage.

This all put me in mind of Clay Shirky’s Nearlynet concept which argues that almost good enough is very often better than a technology specially designed to do a job perfectly.

And in this case, low tech Austria has easily the best solution, balancing revenue generation with an easy user interface. Sometimes, simple really does do the job and let’s not forget that in our daily work.