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| New report casts doubt on pan-European ETC in short term.
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10/12/04 |
The European Commission faces what could be insurmountable difficulties in its plans to achieve a single cross-border system of electronic toll collection (ETC) and road charging by the end of the decade, according to a new report by UK-based transport consultants, SBD.
The report identifies what it sees as a series of issues that show ambitions for a pan-European, fully interoperable system of ETC to be unrealistic in the short and medium term. Its report, An Introduction to Electronic Toll Collection and its Implication for Telematics, looks at the current status of ETC systems across Europe, both in operation and under development. It also scrutinises the implications for telematics services such as traffic information and e-call automatic emergency alerts.
The study attempts to demonstrate that Europe already has a poor record on the interoperability of ETC services between different countries. Each nation has hitherto developed its own system for toll collection, with at present only one example of cross-border co-operation.
"A future single contract and invoice system would have to take into account the split between public and private toll operators and the national differences in areas such as tariffs, sales tax and legislation." says the report.
As well as the contractual problems, SBD claims that the technical aspect of standardisation also presents major difficulties with four principle technologies currently in use or under development including:
oAutomatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), used for enforcing the London congestion charge.
oDedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), the most widespread system, used for automatic payment on toll motorways, bridges and tunnels.
oTachograph, in use on heavy goods vehicles and passenger carrying coaches.
oSatellite tracking/positioning (GSM/GPS), adopted in Germany for truck tolls and under
consideration in the UK and the Netherlands for road charging.
The authors point out that it has taken 10 years for the ETC industry to reach agreement on a European standard for DSRC, but even now this standard is incompatible with the system currently used by around four million Italian drivers. The issue of DSRSC interoperability with other technologies, such as GSM/GPS is also only at the research stage.
A GSM/GPS system for road charging has been made a long-term government target in the UK, with implementation some time after 2008 for heavy goods vehicles. SBD identifies this technology as being the only ETC system that can also potentially support telematics services, including the e-Call provision that the EC would like to see introduced for all new cars from around 2010.
"The European ETC industry has a poor reputation for interoperability, even for a single technology such as DSRC," said David Bell, SBD managing director. "This, together with the challenges of integrating new technologies and overcoming cross-border contractual issues, suggests that the European Commission's target of single, standard system will be very difficult to achieve."
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