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Less than four months before it is due to go live, the much delayed and much troubled German RUC system appears to have turned the corner with preliminary test results claiming to show a high level of accuracy in the tolling technology.
The tests, involving a total of 41 commercial vehicles travelling over some 139,000 km of the German autobahn network, were conducted by the Toll Collect consortium and are said to have shown accuracy levels in the order of 99.6%.
The contract to provide a national, distance-based road user charging scheme for lorries has been dogged by legal challenges, political arguments and concerns over the robustness of the satellite-based technology concerned. After a string of delays, the German government began imposing a daily fine on the consortium at the beginning of November 2003 for each day that it failed to begin operations. Toll Collect was then given until the end of January 2004 to provide a definitive date for the commencement of the scheme. Just over two weeks after the deadline, following a fresh offer from the consortium proposing a further 28 month delay, the German government moved to cancel the contract.
In a statement at the time, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said his government had rejected the offer because it would have left his government carrying the main burden of risk for the project. "(The contract) failed because of technology," he said.
The Toll Collect Consortium, consisting of Deutsche Telekom, DaimlerChrysler, Siemens and Cofiroute have been indicating for some time that they fully expect operations to begin, as scheduled, on 1st January 2005 despite continuing software problems that have resulted in the occasional display of erroneous messages on the OBU.
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