Rule Britannia

The British Dept of Transport is sponsoring what it calls a Demonstration of Interoperable Road-user Electronic Charging and Telematics Systems (DIRECTS), beating out the champion Germans in the coining of cumbersome names. British consultant Ian Catling writes that this will be the “largest EFC trial ever carried out anywhere in the world.” (TOLLtrans Aug/Sept 2000 p55) EFC stands for electronic fee collection, and like ERP or electronic road pricing is just another name for electronic tolling (ET). This “largest ever, anywhere” trial in the cities of Leeds and Edinburgh will involve “at least 1,000 volunteers and millions of transactions,” says Catling. But those Aussies had several thousand volunteers testing Melbourne CityLink’s open-road ET system on the Tullamarine Freeway and did millions of transactions back in 1998. They now have over 500,000 ‘volunteers’ using the system. They are called customers. And come to think of it, here in the US the E-ZPass system in has about 5 million ‘volunteers’ and does about 3 million transactions every day of the week.

Guess actually DOING IT doesn’t count for a British researcher.