Charging, Tolling & RUC

The Netherlands has been looking at incentivising rush-hour avoidance. The intention is to better understand road users' motivations and find alternatives to congestion charging. Something significant needs to happen if we are to adequately address the traffic congestion and other issues caused by the ever-rising numbers of vehicles on our roads. Congestion or distance-based charging is seen as one way of managing demand and raising revenue for improvements to transport infrastructure. However, charging is

There is no value in further US VMT charging trials, except to delay the inevitable. These trials should end after completion of the University of Iowa's National Evaluation of a Mileage-based Road User Charge. There is far greater promise in unleashing private operators to commence profitable, non-tolling services, then using these for toll assessment and collection as fuel distributors are currently used to collect fuel taxation. Bern Grush writes

Jack Opiola provides an overview of the ongoing debate over US infrastructure funding and the progress – or lack of it – towards vehicles miles travelled road user charging. The future funding of transportation and mobility infrastructure is attracting increased attention. There has been sharp debate in the US, where landmark reports from the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission and the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission both stated that the cu

TwinSet, a contactless smart card that combines HF and UHF features on the same card, has been launched by ASK. The UHF chip is for fast track access, such as tolling or parking access control, while the HF chip is for compliance with the existing equipment for building access control and a contact chip when necessary for logical access control.

In 2006, within a span of four months, two incidents of drivers entering the 16km-long Westpark Tollway in Houston, Texas resulted in horrific accidents that caused a number of fatalities. As a result, Harris County Toll Road Authority (HCTRA) began investigating technologies that could help detect vehicles entering the tollway in the wrong direction.

Manfred Rietsch, group president of Federal Signal Technologies (FST), talks about the recent acquisitions forming FST and the organisation's plans for the future. "Our philosophy is going to be about open access" Federal Signal has been on a buying spree. An energetic policy of acquisition over the past few months has seen the company reposition itself as an end-to-end provider of Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) systems with what it states is a portfolio of proven, best-in-class technologies which will al

Italian company Tattile has introduced an ANPR-based free flow tolling system. The all-in-one solution provides a detection rate of better than 99.5% and features two 5Mp CMOS technology sensors, dedicated to number plate reading and context images respectively. The company says the system is able to capture and process up to 75 images per second, detecting vehicles at speeds up to 250 km/h.

Aaxeon Technologies has launched an 8-port industrial RS-232/422/485 PCI express card. The new MSC-208C, which is universally compatible with up to eight new and legacy RS- 232/422/485 devices, offers a PCI express single high speed serial slot and is fully compliant with PCI express base specifications. It supports a baud rate up to 921.6 Kbps and may be offered with surge and isolation protection (MSC- 208C-SI).

Perceptics has launched a new licence plate reader (LPR) aimed at turnpike authorities and e-tolling system integrators to help capture more unpaid tolling revenue from violators. The company claims its new system is a higher performance technology designed to capture license plate data across a wider field of view than existing LPR systems, enabling authorities to read data in situations where a vehicle changes lanes. According to Perceptics, vehicles without pre-paid tolling transponders will typically ch

Raytheon has been selected by Transurban (USA) to deliver an integrated tolling and traffic management system for a 22.5km section of the I-495 Capital Beltway in Northern Virginia.