Transport Technology Consultants - Technology strategies for telematics and road user charging

Road User Charging exists in many forms; from toll collection to national road pricing. The most common forms are:

• Urban Congestion Charging
• Electronic Toll Collection
• Lorry Road User Charging

And all of these are backed up by effective localised enforcement.

1.Urban Congestion Charging

Urban congestion charging means that pricing of roadspace is used as a mechanism for managing demand, signalling the external cost of road usage and encouraging a shift by time or mode within the urban environment. It can include the simple application of tolls although this usually has different policy objectives such as funding infrastructure developments. The price of road use may be differentiated by vehicle type such as its emissions class, user group and purpose of journey although the most workable and enforceable schemes use known or declared vehicle or user characteristics as far as reasonable possible.

The challenges to implementation include public acceptability within the charged area(s) and commuting catchment areas, securing critical mass of political acceptability through the development of the scheme, ensuring adequate enabling legislation, sensitivity to streetscape design and incorporation of legacy ITS services.

A scheme may be operated simply through enforcing payments made off-line such as that operated in London. Schemes that offer accounts-based charging use point-based detection technologies such as Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), to identify the applicable account. In addition, cameras with supporting Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), otherwise known as License Plate Recognition (LPR), may be used to identify the vehicle to enable video-accounts or as the basis of an image-based evidential enforcement regime.

Examples of urban congestion charging schemes include Singapore (known locally as Electronic Road Pricing), London (Congestion Charging and the Low Emission Zone), Stockholm (Congestion Tax / Environmental Tax) and since January 2008, Milan’s Eco-Pass.

2.Electronic Toll Collection

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Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) is an advanced form of toll collection that employs automatic detection technologies to reduce operating costs and increase convenience to road users. Historically, the policy objective of tolling is to pay for infrastructure development and maintenance although increasingly this may be extended to include an element of demand management by varying charging levels at different times of the day for different vehicle categories.

ETC was first applied on a commercial basis in 1987 to enable the business case for a small toll scheme in Ålesund (Norway) that would not have been viable with manual methods. The early stage growth of ETC was aimed at upgrading plaza-based toll schemes although as the capability of DSRC was extended to multi-lane communications it became possible to charge vehicles on the open road with Multi-Lane Free Flow (MLFF) systems. Simultaneously, image-based enforcement had developed to support this when combined with non-contact vehicle detection and tracking systems. Early examples of MLFF-based charging were deployed on the Dallas Turnpike (Tx. US) and Tauern Autobahn (Austria) for toll collection. ETC is now routinely applied on toll plazas and the open road for public and privately-funded road schemes worldwide.

Charges can also be based on distance travelled on either closed toll roads, bounded by toll plazas at entry and exit. However, if point-based vehicle detection and identification is uneconomic, for example on complex or large road networks, methods based on Global Navigation Satellite System / Cellular Network (GNSS / CN) can be used to measure road usage. As road charging policies evolve further, particularly in countries that lack a traditional tolling heritage, then GNSS / CN is likely to become more prominent as a method of recording road usage. However, regardless of the method of recording usage, either at discrete entry-exit locations or on a more continuous segment-by-segment basis, an enforcement regime is always needed, invariably based on a combination of fixed and mobile locations that capture images to prove vehicle presence and identity.

Overall, ETC is now considered as a reliable and efficient means of charging for road use on schemes that aim to maximise revenue collection efficiency. As the needs of toll road operators migrate from depending on cash to electronic means of payment, the relationship between the tolling authority and road user changes. For the first time the authority needs to know who the road user is or, in an interoperable environment, who issued the means of payment and who will guarantee the charges applied.

References that depend on point charging include 407 ETR (Toronto, Canada), Melbourne City Link (Australia) and the Santiago Urban concessions (Santiago, Chile). Larger area schemes that use GNSS include the lorry road user charging schemes in Germany (autobahns only), Czech Republic (motorways and primary routes) and Switzerland (all roads).

3.Lorry Road User Charging / e-vignette

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Lorry road user charging, as the name implies, is applied to a specific category of vehicle. In some countries in Europe, heavy goods vehicles are required to display a paper license ("vignette") that permits the vehicle to use high quality national and trans-national routes. A more sophisticated form of this annual license that does not differentiate on actual usage is the "electronic vignette".

Road usage can be recorded by a variety of means; from a hub odometer as used in New Zealand, DSRC tags used in Austria and some of the US schemes, a hybrid DSRC/GNSS OBU used in Switzerland and hybrid GNSS/CN/DSRC used in Germany. Invariably, the charging policy dictates the technology choice and not the other way around. In all cases, enforcement is based on a combination of fixed and mobile equipment from simple manual inspection to high volume fixed portal gantries on strategic routes.

4.Enforcement

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Road user charging would not be practical or economically viable without an effective enforcement regime. The real meaning of "enforcement" will, of course, depend on the perspective adopted by a charging authority but, as a minimum, an enforcement strategy needs to be based on three fundamental objectives:

• To ensure compliance – to ensure the charging policies and payment rules are followed by all road users.
• To act as an effective deterrent to non-payment - to inform and raise awareness of scheme requirements to reduce the temptation to evade payment
• To recover revenue - to ensure that the fees that are due are paid by road users and thereby protect the revenue stream.

In any case, enforcement is not an event but a process -- a mix of technologies, well-defined procedures, human resources and enabling laws to deter any attempts at non-compliance with the charging policy and, when non-compliance is detected, enabling steps to be taken to secure revenues. If the strategy is simply to deny access to, or exit from, a charged road network then the enforcement process can rely on physical constraints such as barriers. However, the introduction of charging on new or existing roads without a toll plaza means that enforcement needs to rely upon capturing evidence of a vehicle’s presence at a specific location and at a specific time. Installing physical constraints is, in most cases, not an option on existing roads. Evidential methods are currently based on the capture and processing of images although in the future, Electronic Registration Information (ERI) shows some promise – if and when an electronic signature is accepted as evidence of presence of a vehicle.

"Pickford, A., Blythe, P., Road User Charging and Electronic Toll Collection, Artech House, 2006"