A British perspective on the difficulties of toll interoperability, the case of EETS - by Andrew Pickford

Europe and the US have approached interoperability in very different ways; both regions having their roots in isolated, proprietary technologies from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The battle between vendors in Europe slowed the pace of development of DSRC standards as you point out.

Meanwhile, the US regionalised its technology solutions into the NE, SE and SW of the US (noting that the E-ZPass solution is not credited enough with having created what may be the world’s largest user-centric interoperable community of operators). There is no early focus on multi-sourcing of DSRC solutions in the US though these monopolies are slowly breaking down.

Meanwhile in Europe, having had a painfully long decade developing a suite of DSRC specifications the power balance shifted to toll operators who, keen to lock-in multi-sourcing of DSRC technologies, developed nationally interoperable solutions. This process is ongoing and works well within France, Spain, Portugal and Norway. Cross-border interoperability remains a challenge although clusters of countries such as (a) Norway, Sweden and Denmark (b) Spain and Portugal (plus others) demonstrated how cross-border differences of data protection, currency, GST/VAT difference and languages could be managed.

Emerging policies in distance-based charging (varying by time and location also) introduced GNSS-based systems which has its own standards fora. The Dutch National Road Pricing scheme is predicated on the abolition of ownership-related taxes for distance-based charges although the challenge of interoperability with neighbouring countries has been left to EETS.

EETS aims to separate account issuing/management from road operations and toll/charge collection - it will mean that a toll road operator will be able to purchase account issuing and customer management services from a range of service providers. The impact of this is that small-to-medium size road operators (including town and cities) will have lower start-up costs and should be able to return a larger proportion of revenues to bond holders or road users in the form of enhanced transportation, incl. public transport or other complementary measures.

In short, why does each road operator need to develop its own end-to-end solution when it could procure services from dedicated non-road operating service providers? The benefits of economies of scale could then partially accrue to smaller operators.The cost and skills requirement of setting up and operating a tolling regime could be reduced if approaches such as EETS could be made to work.

It also means that that traditional model of each road operator ‘owning’ its customers will be less economically defensible. Sweden’'s planned truck tolling scheme is built on this solution and the South African nationally interoperable ETC programme is similar (although with one account issuer / manager for multiple road operators). In most of these projects the transponders/OBUs for vehicles are routinely purchased from a competitive market of vendors, independently of any roadside infrastructure. Satellite GPS/GNSS-centric systems will also benefit from this separation, having roadside infrastructure mostly for enforcement though.

If we can agree that ‘policy leads, and technology follows,’ then the US and Europe have toll technologies that have satisfied their respective policy-makers so far. Institutional inertia and not lack of technology innovation has been partly to blame for slow progress in Europe.

EDITOR'S NOTE: this is an edited version of comment Pickford emailed to another internet list after your editor posted a few provocative remarks saying the Europeans got the worst of standardization - the downside of freezing technology to CEN278, failing to get the benefits of ISO 18000 6B/6C sticker tags and advanced 5.9GHz OmniAir DSRC, while failing to take advantage of CEN278 with business arrangements for interoperability - the result useless front end interoperability but national transponders. By contrast on this side of the Atlantic voluntary cooperation under E-ZPass has got 70% of US electronic tolls interoperable - by Andrew Pickford.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Pickford's piece was written in response to this (http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/4478) and to a rather rude comment we made on a pricing chat list to the effect that the Europeans skilfully managed to the get the worst of both sides of standardization of electronic toll technology with CEN278. They locked themselves in to early-1990s plastic boxed electronics, while failing to reap the advantages of front-end interoperability through an inabilty to follow through on the back-office end with pan-European business arrangements. So their vehicles need an array of identical plastic boxes on the windshield from different toll system operators.

 The US by contrast managed to gain more interoperability than Europe under the E-ZPass and intra-state cooperative models (CA, TX, FL) and meant we weren't locked in to museum-piece electronics. Lacking stifling standards we have an array of technologies available from $2 sticker tags more capable than 1990s $20 plastic boxes through way-more-capable 5.9GHz radios.

This was of course a wild over-simplification - and American chauvinism - but it generated productive comment such as the above.

Stir 'em up! - editor.

Pickford's contact details are: andrew.pickford@dsl.pipex.com http://www.iroad.co.uk

TOLLROADSnews 2009-12-10