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Congestion charging: Technical options for the deliveryof future UK policy

P.T. Blythe *

Transport Operations Research Group, School of Civil Engineering and Geoscience, Cassie Building,

University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK

Received 3 December 2003; received in revised form 22 February 2005; accepted 22 February 2005

Abstract

From a legacy of almost no experience of charging for road use in the UK, except for a small number oftolled estuarial and river crossings and some innovative flirtations with congestion charging trials, such asthe Cambridge congestion charging scheme in the mid-1990s, in the new millennia the UK is now at the

forefront of research and the deployment of road user charging. With the successful urban congestioncharging schemes now in place in the Cities of London and Durham and the planned introduction ofHGV-distance based charging in 2008 the UK have embraced the charging for road use, however in addi-tion the Government is also now actively looking at the feasibility of introducing a National road usercharging system to fully or partially replace fixed car-tax and fuel-duty. This raises challenges both of apolitical and technical nature which are discussed in the paper. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction and background

The milestone government report Traffic in Towns, better known as the Buchanan Report(HMSO, 1963), predicted that in the UK the 12 cars owned per 100 people in 1962 would riseto 38 cars per 100 people in 1995. They were right and this heroic prediction underscores all

0965-8564/$ - see front matter 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.tra.2005.02.012

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Transportation Research Part A 39 (2005) 571587
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the problems to which the relentless growth of car ownership has given rise over those three dec-ades. Where the authors of the Buchanan Report were wrong in their prediction, however, was inassuming little further growth beyond that. They predicted that a saturation level in ownership

would be at only 4045 cars per 100 people by about 2010. The truth is that saturation ownershiplevels already being reached in several countries (USA, Italy and Luxemburg, for example) are at6065 cars per 100 people. This and other evidence points to the UK being still only two-thirds ofthe way to saturation level in car-ownership. If real disposable incomes go on rising, the overallsize of the car population in the UK is likely to rise, from 23M this year to an eventual plateau of33M to 36M some time before 2040 (DfT, 2003).

If we choose not to plan for it or fail in our best endeavours to combat it, a prospective 50%increase in traffic over the next 30 or so years will lead to a considerable worsening of congestion.The CBI has estimated the overall cost of traffic congestion, to UK plc, as being in excess of21,000M per year (Blythe, 2003). This is more than all the other external costs of road traffic

that fall on society (accidents, noise, pollution, CO2 output, etc.) put together. The potential eco-nomic returns and social benefits of reducing congestion, therefore, are huge.In the 1998 Transport White Paper (DETR, 1998) a shift in emphasis in transport policy was

made, moving away from the short-term predict and provide policy of building roads to meetdemand to the emphasis on Integrated Transport and utilising policy and (Intelligent TransportSystems) ITS-tools to persuade the UKs drivers to use their cars a little less and use alternativetransport a little more. Key to this was the promise of enabling legislation to empower localauthorities to introduce congestion charging, as a means to manage traffic congestion and to allowlocal authorities to retain the income for re-investment in the local transport infrastructure andimprovements in public transport. This has resulted in a number of cities adopting or proposingto adopt road use charging using a variety of technological solutions.

In parallel with this the Department for Transport (DfT) launched the Demonstration of Inter-operable Road-user End-to-end Charging and Telematics Systems (DIRECTS) research pro-gramme which aims at trialing interoperable solutions for road-use charging in Leeds with aview to delivering a National Specification for congestion charging (Mackinnon, 2003; Tindall,2004). The trial phase, with around 800 volunteer drivers will be launched in the spring of2005 (Mackinnon, 2003).

The two activities above make a sensibly synergetic packagehowever for road-use charging inthe UK, this is not the full story. The successful fuel tax protests of 2000 posed a problem for thegovernment in dealing with the increasing inflows of foreign HGV hauliers, filling up at Irish andcontinental Channel ports with their (now cheaper) diesel and using the British road network for

free. This in turn led the Treasury in November 2001 (HM Treasury, 2001) to publish a consul-tation paper on distance-based charging for all HGVs, British and foreign alike, to ensure faircompetition in haulage and shift to an efficient direct charging regime at the point of use.The precedent for this already exists: Switzerland and Austria have already introduced nationwidecharging schemes for HGVs since 2000 and 2004, respectively (Balmer, 2003; Egeler and Bib-aritsch, 2003) and Germany plans to in 2005 (Charpentier and Fremont, 2003; Ruidisch, 2003;Kossak, 2004). The Chancellor (i.e. UK Finance Minister) confirmed plans for distance-basedHGV charging in his April 2002 budget which broadly has the backing of the Freight TransportAssociation (FTA) and of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The launch of the pro-curement phase was made in May 2004 with the current timetables suggesting that the HGV

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charging will be introduced in the UK in 2008 (already a slippage of 2 years from the originallymooted launch date of 2006). In the background, however, there is the feeling that the real agendais to examine the feasibility of how quickly such a scheme can be rolled out to include cars and

other vehicles using our congested motorways, i.e. a National Road Use Charging Scheme. TheCommission for Integrated Transport (CfIT) see this as the logical corollary to developing con-gestion charging in the urban hot spots (CfIT, 2002) and this future approach was largely con-firmed in a major policy speech by the Secretary of State for Transport on 10th July 2003, whoannounced a major research programme to examine all aspects of such an approach (Times,2003).1

The paper will consider how these competing initiatives for road-use charging in the UK areevolving, how technical and interoperable convergence may be possible in the future and whatimpact charging may have on future transport policy in the UK. This is not a new issue, the tech-nology for electronic road pricing has been debated ever since the trials of ERP were hosted in

Hong Kong as far back as 1985. Some of the most visionary and ground-breaking researchwas led by the late Professor Peter Hills team in Transport Operations Research Group (TORG)at Newcastle University (Hills and Blythe, 1989, 1990; Hills and Thorpe, 1991).

2. The case for traffic restraint

One of the direct consequences of rising car-ownership and use is the steady year-on-year de-cline in patronage for most forms of public transport. Across the country, outside of Greater Lon-don, the overall person-km of bus-use have been declining relentlessly since the early 1960s, atbetween 2.0% and 4.0% per year, as passengers opt out of bus-use in favour of the strongly

perceived advantages of going by car (Fig. 1a).The Conservative government of the early 1980s mistakenly regarded the inability of public

transport operators to retain their market-share as being due to lack of competition and to exces-sive regulation. The Transport Act 1985, therefore, set about the deregulation and privatisation ofall bus operations outside Greater London. Although much was achieved by this radical shake-up(the breaking of union power, sharp reductions in real costs of bus operation, the widespreadintroduction of mini buses, downward pressure on wage-levels, some reduction in overall subsi-dies for public transport and so on), the one key indicator it failed to influence was the on-goingyear-on-year loss of patronage. In the English Metropolitan Counties, the privatised bus opera-tors have lost more than 40% of their person-km over the 17 years since deregulation. The irony

is that Greater London, the only place in Great Britain exempt from the 1985 Act, has managedto hold on to its patronage and, in recent years even to increase it. London, of course, is unique inits size, its chronic traffic congestion and its comprehensive railway network, encouraging veryhigh levels of public transport use, especially for journeys to work in the centre.

All of this suggests that the scope for public transport to compete successfully against cars, soas to curb the future growth of traffic, is severely limited (particularly in the deregulated environ-ment we now have). It would require authorities with powers similar to those of Transport for

1 Editors note: The paper by Glaister and Graham in this issue reports on the first analysis of national road usercharging in the UK.

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London (TfL) to be set up in all metropolitan areas or regions in Britain, to enforce Quality Con-tracts with private operators, to plan new public transport investment and to administer increas-ing volumes of public subsidy in order to stabilise the market share.

In any other sector, faced with a rapidly rising demand, the most obvious response usually is toexpand supply to keep pace. This would be possible in the case of road traffic, except in the largerurban areas, but is no longer regarded as an acceptable solution in isolation. On interurban trunk

roads and motorways, capacity can and will be provided mainly by widening the congested sec-tions of the network rather than by building new routes in green fields. However, in suburbanareas, where car-ownership and use is rising fastest, the opposition to new road-building is con-siderable. Often, the argument revolves around the question of induced traffic i.e. that buildingnew roads, by adding capacity to the network, induces more traffic than before. Although theStanding Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment confirmed in their report (SACTRA,1994) that this was a real phenomenon and should be accounted for in highway planning and eval-uation, it is usually only at the level of a side effect. Indeed, except when the amount of inducedtraffic is sufficiently large to cause congestion on the new road, it will generally contribute to theeconomic benefit of the scheme. The National Road Traffic Forecast (NRTF, 1997) confirmed

this, by demonstrating that, in the long-term, even if no more road capacity were built, future traf-fic would be suppressed by only 1012% due to increasing congestion. The economic cost of thismounting congestion, of course, would be huge.

The third approach often canvassed is one that invokes planning policies aimed deliberately atreducing the need for travel and the perceived dependence on cars to provide it. Advocates of thisapproach argue that residential densities should be increased sharply, new developments concen-trated on brown field rather than green field sites and in corridors amply served by publictransport. Much tighter parking standards and persistent campaigns to change peoples lifestylesin favour of bicycling, walking and (if necessary) car-sharing are all part of this approach. Unfor-tunately, apart from a few well-publicised successes, so much of this goes against the direction of

Fig. 1. (a) Passenger travel by mode 19521995 Great Britain (in Developing an integrated transport policy: factual

background August 1997, Government Statistical Service). (b) Passenger travel by mode 1997 comparing GreatBritain with other EU countries (in European Best Practice in Transport August 2000, Commission for IntergartedTransport).



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current market forces in planning and development that it is hard to see how this will be effectivein curbing overall traffic growth, even in the long-term.

The remarkable features of the 1998 Transport White Paper (DETR, 1998), and of the Trans-

port Act 2000 to which it gave rise, are threefold: first, that it recognised for the first time, atgovernment level, that traffic restraint policies are inevitable (demand management is theeuphemism employed). Secondly, that no single approach to the problem of future traffic growthwill be effective on its own, hence the emphasis on integration and multi-modal studies. Lastly,and most crucially, it introduced the possibility of including congestion pricing as the one part ofthe integrated package of policies that has the necessary potency to curb traffic growth.

3. Paving the way to implementation

The easiest way, administratively, to raise the overall price of car-use is for government toincrease fuel duty on the price of fuel at the pumps. This in relative terms, this is being doneby reducing the annual fixed-charge vehicle excise duty (VED); for example, fuel tax for a 38-tonne (4 2 axle) lorry has increased from 83% of annual taxes in 1998 to 93% in 2003, makingthe taxes more closely reflect the distance travelled. The Royal Commission on EnvironmentalPollution (RCEP) in 1993having largely dismissed the arguments for congestion chargingpro-posed the doubling of retail fuel prices in real terms within 10 years. On the strength of this advice,the (then) Conservative government introduced the fuel-price escalator, at +5% p.a. in realterms, for the foreseeable future. In the run-up to the 1997 election, New Labour were notto be out-done and promised to raise this to +6% p.a. By Autumn 2000, when the whole policyunravelled in the face of blockades and civil protests, the retail price per litre of petrol in the UK

was the highest in the EU.Even without the spontaneous revolt, the arguments against continuing the escalator were com-

pelling. As fuel tax is paid proportionately to the use made of the road-system, it makes no dis-tinction between that use being on a rural road at night and on a city centre street at the peak ofthe morning journey-to-work rush. In short, fuel taxes are a poor proxy for the marginal costs ofcongestion. Nevertheless, the political set-back of the successful fuel tax protest posed a problemfor the government in dealing with the increasing inflows of foreign HGV hauliers, filling up atIrish and continental Channel ports with their (now cheaper) diesel and using the British road net-work for free.

To bring about the pay as you go policies outlined above, technically, we need to introduce

an efficient charging mechanism that can levy road-use charges automatically from drivers with-out the need for them to stop and pay. Thus, charging systems should enable the collection ofthese charges at normal highway speeds and without the need for segregating vehicles into sepa-rate lanes, as with conventional toll-collection facilities. Indeed, it would be infeasible andunworkable, in many locations, to require traffic to be segregated into lanes, drivers to stop theirvehicles and pay cash to an operator or by inserting coins, bank-notes or a card into a collectingmachine. Building these toll plazas (such as those at the Dartford, Tyne and Mersey river cross-ings and throughout Southern and Central Europe, where purpose-built toll roads are wide-spread) is costly and crucially requires substantial land-area for each site. It is generally notpractical to retro-fit a toll plaza to an existing roadin urban areas, this may be unacceptable



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on other grounds, such as the creation of additional congestion, noise and air pollution. More-over, purpose-built toll roads have a limited number of entry and exit points, whilst access toun-tolled roads usually is not so restrictedcreating an additional difficulty when introducing

urban road charging.The publication of the Governments White Paper on Integrated Transport in July 1998

(DETR, 1998) caused a shift in emphasis in the UK away from road building, based upon thepredict and provide principle, towards demand management (i.e. traffic restraint) and a betterintegration of modes. Moreover, to encourage Local Authorities to consider congestion chargingas an option to manage the demand for car travel, the Transport Act 2000 requires Local Author-ities to retain the net revenue raised from congestion charging and/or private non-residential(PNR) charging for a minimum of 10 yearsthis ring fenced revenue must be reinvested in localtransport schemes. This provision may well be the linch-pin in cities being able to secure sufficientpublic acceptance for future congestion charging schemes, offering a mechanism whereby thestick

of Congestion Charging can be offset by thecarrots

of a new revenue stream to financeimprovements in local transport and infrastructure.The concept of direct road-use charging is not new. Indeed, road-use charging has been consid-

ered as a tool for managing congestion and raising revenue for many decades, although few trialsand implementations have actually taken place. The economic theory on which the principle ofroad-use pricing is based was put forward by Pigou (the father of welfare economics) in 1920, withVickrey (1969) and Walters (1961) relating it specifically to road traffic. The first official acknowl-edgement of the technical possibilities of direct pricing at the point of use was the Smeed Report(1964). Since then, a great deal of research has been undertaken and a number of attempts to intro-duce urban road-use charging have been made, most notably the Hong Kong trials (19831985and 1998), the Singapore Area Licensing Scheme (19751998)now replaced by an automatic

electronic scheme (see http://www.lta.gov.sg)and the toll-rings around Bergen, Trondheimand Oslo in Norway (Blythe et al., 2001). Motorway schemes, using electronic devices to auto-mate single-lane existing toll-collection facilities are quite widespread and include numerousexamples in the USA, Asia and Southern and Central Europe (Italy, France, Greece, Spain, Por-tugal, Slovenia, etc.), as well as new multi-lane tolling schemes on Torontos Highway 407(www.407etr.com) and the Melbourne CityLink (see http://www.transurban.com.au/).

4. Technological options for congestion charging

Currently, several electronic technologies are used or have been considered for charging. Themore important of these are briefly reviewed below.

Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) systems, for two-way communication between aroadside or gantry beacon and in-vehicle tags or transponders.

Wide-area communications-based systems, which use some form of location system coupledwith communication systems to manage and enforce the charging.

Video-based license-plate recognition systems, using roadside cameras with automatic opticalcharacter recognition (OCR) software to match vehicles number plates with a pre-registeredlist.

http://www.lta.gov.sg/http://www.407etr.com/http://www.transurban.com.au/http://www.transurban.com.au/http://www.407etr.com/http://www.lta.gov.sg/


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4.1. Microwave-based dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) systems

These systems need road-side equipment, typically mounted on a gantry, with electronic tags in

the vehicles which may be read-only, readwrite or smartcard-based. Read-only tags contain afixed identification code which, when interrogated by a roadside reading device at the chargingpoint, conveys this identity to the roadside system. The code relates to the identity of the vehicleor the identity of the users account. Read-only tags operate reliably only if used for single-laneoperation at low speed and over a short range. However, their inflexibility, dumbness and inabil-ity to work in a high-speed, multi-lane road situation essentially limits their application to that ofautomating existing toll-plazas. Readwrite tags are a logical development of the read-only tag.They can receive data from the roadside and store this data directly on the tag. The most flexiblein-vehicle units (IVUs) are transponders (smart tags) that often support smartcards interfaced tothem. They are intelligent, having the capability to handle and process many kinds of data and

(potentially) to be programmed to manage a number of different applications. Such a system re-quires a reliable, high-speed two-way data-communications link with the roadside and more com-plex on-board equipment, replacing some of the processing requirements traditionally handled bythe roadside equipment (Fig. 2).

A modular approach is adopted to the transponders design, facilitating add-on peripheralequipment (e.g. smartcard readers, keyboards, displays, connections to other in-vehicle equip-ment). Such transponders were first developed in the EU funded project ADEPT (automatic deb-iting and electronic payment for transport) project in the early 1990s (Blythe and Hills, 1994;Blythe, 1998), a European funded project led by TORG in the early 1990s which installed trialsystems in the UK, Sweden, Portugal and Greece (Fig. 3). The modularity in the design of theautomatic debiting transponder allows several different forms of payment (all of them cashless)

with one device. Possession of a transponder offers uses the possibility of holding a positive (or alimited negative) balance of credit-units, either directly in the transponders memory or alterna-tively on a separate smartcard interfaced to the transponder. The smartcard, being portable,can then be used for other payment purposes. These systems are perceived by many international

Fig. 2. Schematic for a DSRC transponder-based charging system.



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road administrations as the future of road-use charging, where high-volume, multi-lane roadsneed to be tolled without restricting traffic flow. European standardisation of DSRC systemsnears completion and many products based upon 5.8 GHz microwave communications technol-ogy are emerging in the market-place, though to date few commercial installations exist. World-wide, the Singapore system, the Melbourne City link and Highway 407 in Canada utilise such anapproach. The key limiting factor seems to be the processing speed of the smartcardin Singa-pore, each charging point has two gantriesone to start communications with the vehicle anda second (further down the road) to complete the transaction and perform enforcement measures,if necessary. The DIRECTS project, using 800 or so volunteer drivers who will have their vehiclesequipped for the trial in Leeds, will finally prove an end-to-end solution for DSRC-based charg-ing. The aim of DfT is to develop a UK national specification for interoperable payment of road-

use charges, consistent with the emerging European standards.As with each of the three classes of charging systems considered here, the DSRC systems usu-

ally use video and ANPR as an enforcement system to detect unequipped or fraudulent usersasat the moment the licence plate is the only unique identifier available to identify the vehicle if thecharging equipment is not working properly, or indeed not installed (Egeler and Bibaritsch, 2003).

4.2. Wide-area communications-based systems

Wide-area systems are a more recent innovation in charging and tolling technologyalsowidely known by the term MPS (mobile positioning systems). They use two technologies adapted

from other applications; namely, GPS (global positioning system), whose satellites enable suitablyequipped vehicles to calculate their location accurately and a two-way communications link basedupon either GSM or DSRC. These systems were tested in the German trials in 19951996 in par-allel with an EPSRC-funded trial in Newcastle during the same period and Hong Kong 19981999(Blythe, 1999). They are designed (like DSRC systems) not to disrupt the flow of multi-lane trafficon motorways. Moreover, because in urban areas virtual toll-points can be established (andchanged, as necessary), these wide-area systems will reduce the amount of environmental intru-sion of roadside infrastructure required, in comparison to DSRC systems.

The in-vehicle unit (IVU) contains a GPS receiver and some computing and memory, whichmust contain a record of the locations of all charging points either pre-stored or downloaded

Fig. 3. ADEPT single multi-lane gantry near Thessaloniki, Greece, 1995: worlds first commercial multi-lane toll-collection at speed.



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directly via the units communication link. At a pricing cordon, the system will deduct the appro-priate charge from the credit-units stored in its account. As GPS is essentially a one-way commu-nications technology, the in-vehicle device also requires an additional communications link formanagement and enforcement purposes. Most systems tend to use GSM to inform the central sys-tem that it is working properly, and once a limit has been reached on the on-board account, en-abling it to initiate the clearing process and allowing a range of credit-transfer options. GSM canalso reload a smartcard and update the IVU with information on the charging tariff and locationsof the virtual pricing sites as well as providing an enforcement function (Fig. 4). The enforcement

function is provided by providing information back to the central or roadside systems that the in-vehicle unit is working properly and deducting chargesif such a message is not received thenthe in-vehicle unit is deemed to not be working properly and enforcement procedures are initiatedwhich require that the licence plate of the vehicle is recorded (generally along with a context pho-tograph of the traffic scene so that there is proof that a vehicle with the licence plate and corre-sponding colour and make of vehicle is present at the point that the evidence is recorded). Severalsystems, including the Swiss lorry charging system utilise DSRC as the technology for communi-cations to provide the enforcement function. An MPS solution lends itself to distance-based andzone-based charging as well. Such a system was planned to go live on the German autobahn net-work in 2002, however due to highly publicised technical difficulties, the system was finally

launched in late 2004 (Charpentier and Fremont, 2003; Ruidisch, 2003; Kossak, 2004).

4.2.1. Third generation cellular radio technology

Proposals have been made for tolling systems based on charging for entering a radio cell, withthe first trials being held on the A555 KolnBonn autobahn in 1996. Until recently, this optioncould be discounted, as phones could not offer sufficient accuracy in pin-pointing the locationof phone is at any given time. However, this may change with the potential locationing functionthat will be inherent in the third generation (3G) licences for mobile phones. The 3G companiesclaim an accurate location service for business phone usersperhaps down to 1015 m resolu-tionwhich may be ample for road-use charging purposes (although evidence for enforcement

Fig. 4. Schematic for a mobile positioning-based road charging system.



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and prosecution may require a greater accuracy of proof of location). However experience withcurrent versions of 3G phones in tests in Newcastle and the extensive trials undertaken in Londonin the first six months of 2004 to evaluate potential future technologies for an extension to the

London Congestion Charging scheme suggest that location accuracy is in the region of several100 m at best (Evans, 2004)not nearly enough to run an effective scheme and deliver credibleevidence for the prosecution of non-payers. Nevertheless, as mobile phones already have secureaccess and a central payment facility (as well as European interoperability), the technology needsonly to provide a credible security and enforcement solution to be considered as a future con-tender (Birle, 2004).

4.3. Video-based license-plate recognition

4.3.1. Video-based systems

Video-based systems rely on the accurate

reading

of vehicles

licence plates as the primarymeans of identifying, charging and enforcing vehicles in a congestion charging scheme. Automaticnumber plate recognition (ANPR) systems process the video images taken by a camera at theroadside or on a gantry, locate the number plate in the image and convert this into the appropri-ate alphabetic/numeric characters, without any human intervention (Fig. 5). The significantadvantage of such an approach is that it removes the need for any in-vehicle equipment to be in-stalled. Moreover, it solves the occasional user problem, whereby those who rarely use a partic-ular charging scheme do not have the necessary in-vehicle equipment to pay the chargesautomatically.

The increasing use of video cameras for road traffic monitoring has given an incentive to im-prove camera technology, including optical processing, to provide a wider contrast range and give

clear images, even when the licence-plates are in heavy shadow or surrounded by bright headlightsin direct alignment with the camera. Unresolved problems with ANPR, however, still include:

number plates of many and different shapes and sizes, number plates which are not retro-reflective,

Fig. 5. Video based congestion charging scheme.



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difficulties for accurate reading in poor weather, due to dirt/rain/snow, non-standardised fonts, similarities between some letters/numbers (Os being read as Ds, for example) and

insufficient control of ambient light at camera positions.

To improve the overall accuracy, some vendors provide for the capture of multiple images; ifANPR determines the same plate information for all, the confidence level of the data is improvedand manual interpretation may not be required. Any discrepancies are either placed in a queue forvisual inspection or treated as a lost revenue transaction. A Government Office for London Re-port (GOL, 2000) reviewed the road-use charging options for London (the ROCOL report) in1998/1999. It studied the feasibility of road-use pricing and work-place parking charging, as wellas the likely impacts on business, traffic levels and users reactions to the charging proposals. Itrecommended that London should implement a video-based road-use charging system, in the first

instance, until the results of the DIRECTS project were available. In August 2002, the Mayor,Ken Livingstone gave the final go-ahead to proceed towards a full-scale implementation of con-gestion charging in central London, using ANPR. The highly publicised launch of London was onthe 17th February 2003and it seems to work. There are clearly some technical problems with thescheme but the management of it seems sufficiently robust to cope. Indeed more than two yearsafter the launch of the scheme reduction in traffic is still around 1518% and the difference in theenvironment and travel-times within the cordon is remarkable (TfL, 2004). This has led to a re-think by many local authorities as to their options for charging.

5. How congestion charging technology may develop

These three competing families of technology for future charging systems have different attri-butes, advantages and disadvantages. For many years, DSRC-based systems have been preferred,due to their simplicity of operation, potential for supporting additional services for vehicle usersand, most importantly, because they are easy for users to understandyou pass a point and youpay. New technologies, however, have opened up new opportunities for innovative chargingschemes. Wide-area charging schemes are attractive and offer new possibilities for charging with-out the main disadvantage of short-range charging systems, namely the associated road-side infra-structure at every charging and enforcement point. Some infrastructure is still required forenforcement purposes (Fig. 4), but this can be situated in locations where aesthetics are not a

prime consideration. Portable and mobile enforcement systems are also possible (Egeler and Bib-aritsch, 2003). Effective operation and enforcement using GPS-based systems was demonstrated inthe recent Hong Kong charging trials (19981999). Moreover, the distance-based taxation ofheavy goods vehicles which is currently being trialled and procured by the UK Treasury andCustoms & Excise (HMCE, 2004) could probably only be efficiently implemented using someform of wide-area charging (probably linked to vehicles digital tachographsas in Switzerland).Video-based charging is a very recent innovation, with London being the first large urban area toadopt such an approach. In Norway, ANPR/video is used as the primary charging means in thecities of Kristiansand and Bergen: however, this is on a very small scale in comparison withLondon. For central London, the scheme has clearly required a very complex back-office clearing



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and management system, to register, on a daily basis, all those who wish to pay to use the chargedarea within the cordon and also to record and process the images of all vehicles recorded, enteringthe charged areabut who have not registered and paid. If the system in London continues to be

deemed a success over the next two or three years, several other UK cities, including Edinburgh,may introduce a similar system although the scaleability of a central London cordon into a muchlarger scheme using the same technology package is as of yet questionable from both a technicalpoint of view and in terms of the unit cost of processing a transaction using the current solutiondeployed in London. Indeed, Transport for London has recognised this and has embarked on aseries of trials to examine a range of potential technologies which could be used to support exten-sions to the London congestion charging zone, this includes GPS and EGNOS based satellitelocation schemes, 2.5G and 3G mobile phones, DSRC (both using microwave and infrared-basedsolutions) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies. Looking ahead, the short-term future evolution of charging is likely to be a fusion of DSRC with either an ANPR or

wide-area charging systemswhich will be able to support several different charging configura-tions with one set of in-vehicle equipment. However recent trials of wide-area technologies(GPS and cellular phones) in the urban environment of London have been less than conclusive(Patchett and Firth, 2005) Whilst the city of Stockholm has decided to use a DSRC technologyto provide a charging cordon around the city by end of 2005 (subject to various on-going judicialreviews) and to facilitate interoperability with some of the toll bridges, such as resund, whichalready operates DSRC toll-technology.

In the longer term advances in communications and mobile networking technologies may actu-ally cause a radical re-think of how vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communica-tions may evolve. Attention of the research community is now focused on fourth generation(4G) systems (Prasad and Munoz, 2003; Prasad and Ruggieri, 2003)not a new technology,

but the integration of a number of existing technologies such as 3G, Digital Audio Broadcast(DAB) and Wireless LAN (WLAN) into heterogeneous wireless networks to provide access toan increasing range of services. Data will be transported through 4G networks using packetswhich conform to the Internet Protocol version 6 (Ipv6) standards. Mobile devices will be ableto connect to a 4G network through the nearest WLAN hot-spot Access Point (AP). This meansthat users become totally independent of the mobile network operator. Local authorities andtransport operators seem to favour this technology as a short to medium term for personal com-munications provision over LAN distances (Edwards et al., 2003). Moves towards investigatingan intelligent pervasive infrastructure for the road transport environment are underway and coor-dinated by the DfT jointly with the DTIs Foresights Intelligent Infrastructure initiative (DTI,

2004).Over the past 18 months or so there has been a rapid evolution of communications and net-working technologies, particularly for the portable market (PCs, mobile phones, PDAs and sim-ilar devices). Of particular interest is the concept of evolving a range of small devices which canconfigure themselves into an intelligent mobile adhoc network (MANET) for communications ormonitoring purposes. These devices currently exist commercially as 10p piece sized devices calledMOTES (MOTES, 2004) which can be fitted with a range of sensors to measure environmentalconditions and are networkable through a self configurable radio interface. On their own thesedevices may have a role to play in transport now for environmental monitoring (pollution, noise,temperature), provision of information (congestion), vehicle to vehicle, in-vehicle and vehicle to



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roadside communications. The potential for such devices to be miniaturised using future nano-technology production processes (Smartdust, 2003) raises new applications which can take advan-tage of an almost-invisible pervasive deployment. Wireless devices are apparent in everyday life

from mobile phones to millimetre precision locating systems. Wireless technology is advancingat speed and the opportunities for use in the intelligent transport field are immeasurable and in-clude areas such as road user charging, congestion control and fleet management.

The opportunity to harness the potential of new, intelligent infrastructure within the roadtransport sector will be a major research issue of the next decade. The ability to monitor, sense,manage and communicate with vehicles, the roadside control systems and the driver offers newand currently unexplored new tools to manage the road network more efficiently. One key appli-cation of a more pervasive approach to control would be the possibility of using such a system toimplement an incremental road-user charging system across the whole of the UK road network ina much more intelligent way than is currently envisaged by the Secretary for State for Transport

and his National Road User Charging Steering Committee which suggests that within 10 years theUK could use a GPS-based pay as you drive solution to replace the fixed price vehicle excise duty(car tax) by a variable charge relating to the usage made by the vehicle.

If one considers that with the appropriate level of intelligent infrastructure probably using someform of MANETS (Mobile Adhoc Network) or other wireless devices (MOTES) then vehicles willbe constantly in communications with other vehicles near it as well the infrastructure (which canthen deliver location based services and intelligent control and safety applications)this alsolends itself to a very discrete form of road pricing, whereby congestion or environmental hotspotscan be priced higher than less effected parts of the road network, whilst cities and road authoritiescan charge appropriately to meet their demand management objectives. Since a National system iscurrently on the UK political agenda, one can use the premise that this could be used to fund an

intelligent wired and wireless infrastructure for roads and streets (and thus connecting into otherinfrastructure and buildings) in the built environmentone could argue that this revenue gener-ating infrastructure could form the basis of a backbone for other applications and servicessuchas traffic control and disaster recovery.

Research and on-road trials in Newcastle have shown that motes are a flexible new technologythat can offer dynamic solutions to meet demand. They have never before been put to use for theseapplications and needs to be tested to define its role in ITS (Fig. 6). Moreover the pervasive natureof the devices lends the technology to enable cars to always be connected to the infrastructureand thus opening up the scope for an intelligent, configurable ITS infrastructure that will be avail-able for a range of applications to support travel and travellers.

The implications of this research suggest that motes and their future nano-sized successorssmartdustmay fill the gap left by microwave and cellular charging techniques and can quiteeasily replace them all together. Studies are underway at Newcastle University to examine thistechnology with trials of prototype devices scheduled for the Spring of 2005. The MOTES usedhere offer the potential of a pervasive mobile communications environment so that vehicles arealways in communications with the roadside infrastructure. As MOTES are miniaturised towardsnano-technology sizes the cost will be reduced to the point where pervasivity becomes economi-cally viable. Whether the communications performance of these WiFi adhoc networks could begood enough to provide the primary form of charging is yet to be proved, however as part ofa hybrid solution (with MPS, DSRC or ANPR) there is no doubt such technology could have



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a role to play in future schemes (Blythe and Pickford, 2004). Nevertheless the new technical pos-sibilities highlighted above may offer some new tools for implementing road user charging in amore fine-grain and flexible way than is readily possible with more conventional automated charg-ing options.

6. Summary

The paper has attempted to illustrate the background to the problem of traffic growth and theconsequent issues associated with traffic congestion in the UK. Moreover it has charted how thedebate on road user charging evolved over the late 1980s to late 1990s in the UK resulting inthe 2000 Transport Act which enabled local authorities to introduce congestion charging. TheUK now has four strands to its road-user charging policies which, at the moment, are not as joined up as they should be to deliver the necessary outcomes and also to make the package,as a whole, understandable (and indeed sellable) to the public, these strands being:

urban congestion charging which may be introduced by local authorities and whose subsequentincome is retained by the authority for reinvestment in local transport-related schemes, such asthose in Durham and London;

the charging for the use of a DBFO road infrastructure, essentially road-tolling as recentlyintroduced with the opening of the M6 Birmingham North Relief Road;

the charging for the use of the road network of HGVs by a distance based tax tempered by thereimbursement of part of the fuel duty paid, if drivers purchase fuel in the UK and

the long-term aim to introduce a National pay-as-you-go road user charging scheme to replace(at least in part) vehicle excise duty and fuel dutyfor the entire UK vehicle population.

Fig. 6. Pervasive vehicle/infrastructure for charging using mobile adhoc networks.



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The technologies to offer efficient and automated ways to collect the charges from the abovescheme-types, are for the first two largely proven, whilst for HGV-charging the design and pro-curement phases are currently underway. As for a National charging scheme it is generally agreedby the key actors in the field that the technology to achieve this at a low cost and with sufficientaccuracy (for evidential purposes) is at least a decade away. This assumption is based upon theassumption that the National scheme will implement some combination of distance-based charg-ing and regional, zonal or even congestion hot-spot charging and will require the use of GNSSsatellite location systems (probably a combination of both the GPS and the Galileo systems withadditional map-matching and inertial navigation). The challenges to achieve this are greatnotleast due to the problems with accurate location finding in highly built up urban areas. Neverthe-less, one can confidently predict that within a decade solutions will be emerging using GNSS. Onewould suggest that there is still an opportunity for other contenders to emerge for future, flexibleroad user charging schemes. At present the young pretenders for future road pricing could be

potentially: a 3G based solution; RFID; or the use of mobile adhoc pervasive computingeachof which is yet to be fully provenbut one would argue at this stage not to be completely dis-counted for future schemes.

One concern with the four strands to charging policy in the UK, is the lack of joining-up andcoordination between them. Surely a great deal of opportunities will be lost if the appropriateagencies and local authorities cannot ensure some commonality between the systems, indeed, darewe not raise the term interoperability. This would reduce the infrastructure and operational costsfor all the systems and potentially a single, or small number of back-end systems for the UKwould facilitate a simpler system for the public to understand. Encouragingly there are indeedsome interoperability being achieved between the DSRC systems used by the M6-toll, some ofthe tolled estuarial crossings and the DSRC trials being undertaken by the DfTs DIRECTS pro-ject. Eventually, TfL may migrate to a DRSC-based solution as well, however at the moment thelack of cooperation between the DfT and Customs and Excise suggest that interoperability withthe HGV charging scheme will be a lost opportunity.

A final concern would be that the four strands of future road use charging policy in the UK arelikely to send out confused and mixed messages to drivers. Will they be able to distinguish be-tween which is a local hypothecated charge (the former two) and which are national tax-raisingmeasures (the latter two)?

To accept one form of chargingas has been demonstrated in Londonis an achievement. Togain the buy-in of the general public and business to four different road use charges is unlikelyparticularly in the UK where the likelihood that the charges will instantly reflect in a better road

and general transport system is optimistic to say the least. Nevertheless the emergence of a poten-tial new generation of mobile technologies to meet the future demands of widespread chargingoffer another unprecedented opportunity for the UK to remain at the forefront of future conges-tion charging ITS research as well as leading the way on implementation.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Dr. John Walker (Thales), Dr. Alan Tully (Newcastle University)and Paul Knight (Faber Maunsel) for comments and advice on various drafts of this paper.



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