Charging, Tolling & RUC

By May this year, the new Gateway Bridge in Brisbane, which is being built alongside an existing bridge, will be open. With it will come an end-to-end free-flow tolling system. Interview with Sue Caelers, Queensland Motorway Ltd. Queensland Motorways Ltd owns and operates 61km of roadway in the area around Brisbane, Australia. This includes the Gateway Bridge and the Gateway Extension, Logan and Port of Brisbane motorways.

Theoretical balance Kallistratos Dionelis, secretary general of ASECAP, comments on the European Commission's new ICT Standardisation Work Programme. I've just read a proposal from the European Commission on the 2010-2013 ICT Standardisation Work Programme. As ASECAP Secretary General this is one of my responsibilities. I work to receive information, to disseminate information and to build bridges and mutual understanding between policy-makers and the industrial world, between ASECAP and others.

Unbroken service Technolution's Winifred Roggekamp and Dave Marples describe efforts to upgrade the Westerscheldetunnel's tolling system to give free-flow capability. Until 2003 the Flanders region of Zeeland, in the south-west of the Netherlands, was connected to the mainland only by ferry. The new Westerscheldetunnel, a 6.6km toll tunnel, improves communications with the region considerably, taking some 100km off the alternative road journey. In 2006 it was recognised that the toll plaza for the tunnel ne

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