National truck tolling scheme compensates for transit traffic

Q-Free's Per Frederik Ecker talks about the Slovak Republic's new truck tolling system, which is intended to compensate for the large amounts of transit traffic which passes through the country.

In January this year 108 Q-Free, together with 189 Siemens, was awarded the contract to deliver the new national truck tolling scheme in the Slovak Republic. This will be operated by Slovakia 479 SkyToll on a 13-year concession and Q-Free is supplying the central tolling and enforcement system, together with a three-year service agreement for a GPS-based truck tolling system. Siemens is supplying the first 80,000 OnBoard Units (OBUs). The construction phase will continue throughout 2009.

The project marks something of a departure. Whilst the world's first national truck toll charging scheme, the LKW-Maut system launched by Germany in 2005, used GPS/GNSS (satellite)-based technology, other more recent schemes have chosen DSRC (tag)-based solutions. The Slovak scheme has returned to the use of GNSS, although Per Fredrik Ecker, Q-Free's Vice President for Sales and Marketing, prefers to see it as something of a hybrid.

"It's both GNSS/GPS and DSRC," he says. "Video and DSRC are used to provide the enforcement element of the scheme, so there is a still a tag within the OBU along with GNSS and GSM communications."

The incorporation of CEN TC278-compatible DSRC - a fast, secure, free-of-charge method of securing identification - also means that the OBU can be made interoperable with other tolling schemes elsewhere which do not use GNSS/GPS.

That said, the choice of GNSS technology reflects the nature of the scheme. Whereas the German truck tolling scheme, for instance, focuses only on strategic routes, that in the Slovak Republic will cover all roads. There is as a consequence a much greater geographical area to consider, which necessitated an infrastructure-light approach if costs were to be kept down and the time to system go-live was to be kept fairly short (the scheme is due to become operational at the beginning of 2010).

Internalising costs

"Slovakia is a very good example of a transit country looking to internalise the costs of through traffic. That's the primary reason for the scheme's introduction rather than, say, looking to reduce environmental impact," says Ecker.

"There is a new operational model being introduced but it is all based on known technologies - it's not a case of building anything from scratch for the first time. It's also intended to deal with a relatively small number of vehicles, at least initially - no more than about 120,000. For comparison, there are around 2 million vehicles on the national tolling register in Norway, Q-Free's home country."

The OBU technology (see Sidebar, 'Acquired expertise') is a mix of 'thick' and 'thin' clients and cannot simply be shoe-horned into one of these long-established categories, he adds.

"No-one has ever really made a thin-client OBU - all transponders incorporate some form of processing capability. It's perhaps more relevant to look what features the OBU needs to have and how to upgrade them. How, for instance, do you control software release? Pulling in all the devices from a national scheme for upgrading is overly expensive. It's better that you do it remotely, which is something we're capable of here.

"Collecting trip information via GPS/GNSS has matured a lot since the German Maut system was created. Nevertheless, the use of a zonal charging system rather than something based on Time/Distance/Place [TDP] means that the Slovak scheme is much simpler to implement." 'Simple' in comparison with the nationwide charging scheme for all vehicles which the Netherlands has announced, for instance: for the new trucking tolling scheme, the Slovak Republic has been divided into zones and virtual gantries, effectively lines on a map, are used. Trucks will pay per zone transited. This information is all reported via GNSS to the back office system.

Ecker: "Although both use GPS/GNSS and are national in terms of geographic reach, the Dutch and Slovak schemes aren't really comparable. The Dutch scheme won't use virtual gantries and there is a lot more calculation involved in TDP-based charging; it will also have to cope with a much greater number of vehicles. The Dutch system simply hasn't been proven before and no-one is expecting it to hit the roads and be up and running by 2010. We'll see trials and demonstrations first. By comparison the Slovakian system has existed in principle for many years." The Slovakian system's ease of implementation provides a model for neighbouring Central European countries, according to Ecker.

Acquired expertise

With the acquisition of London-based Building Capital, Q-Free added world-leading GNSS-based road-pricing solutions to its product portfolio. Building Capital was appointed Research Authority for the Dutch Government's GNSS Road User Charging trials in 2007-2008.

Ecker says this acquisition was an important step for Q-Free, not least because it confirmed the company's intention to be a technology-neutral solution provider.

David Rollafson, Managing Director of Building Capital: "From past supplier experiences, people think that a GNSS OBU is a huge and expensive piece of equipment but this is not so. The Q-Free GNSS OBU is small and non-intrusive. Effectively, it is a DSRC OBU with a power wire. It still fits on the windscreen like a DSRC tag.

"The OBU is the key," he continues. "A GNSS OBU would have cost €500 a few years ago. Today it is significantly less costly and smaller, making the GNSS road pricing market more competitive when you consider the savings in roadside infrastructure and speed of scheme deployment. "It's simply a question of scalability. For the back office system, that's no problem. The real keys are enforcement and the chosen methods of payment - whether or not you go for a flat fee on certain roads, for example, or something more complicated."

DSRC-based enforcement

The choice of CEN-based DSRC to fulfil the enforcement function reflects the progression of technology and standards since the German scheme was introduced back in 2005.

"The Maut scheme uses infrared, which has now been excluded from TC278," Ecker continues. "It's therefore in the situation of having to cope with a single source of supply and not being supported by standards. Infrared faces big challenges when it comes to the weather. It is susceptible to interference from the sun, for instance, and in fact anything that causes a physical obstruction to light, such as metallised vehicle windscreens. Its application in multi-lane free-flow environments is difficult. These aren't trivial issues to contend with."

There are three methods of enforcement: fixed gantries; movable gantries; and enforcement vehicles.

Fixed gantries are fairly typical in applications on multi-lane, free-flow tolling systems on strategic roads. The movable gantry, which is in fact a single pole, is intended to provide the operator with a means of targeting potential rat-runners away from main routes. The enforcement vehicles are an additional mobile resource and are equipped with cameras and DSRC readers.

"This is all about enforcement, not taking 100 per cent of vehicles," Ecker explains. "The combination of fixed and mobile enforcement is an efficient way of doing things - and it doesn't need to be 100 per cent effective; the enforcement system in Germany, for example, doesn't catch everybody but it is enough to get people to pay the toll.

"The situation changes of course if you go looking to charge all vehicles on a national road network. Then you may need sections of road where enforcement is 100 per cent. Again, though, that's already technically possible."

Efficiency

A discussion over enforcement efficiency leads naturally into another about overall system efficiency. This is something which gives rise to much debate when it comes to national tolling projects. For instance, 4984 Kapsch TrafficCom's Erwin Toplak is on record as saying that the concept of charging all vehicles on all roads at all times is an exercise in diminishing returns. He contends that a government or authority looking to maximise revenues might be better off targeting only the most heavily used roads and that attempting to retrieve revenues from the more occasional use of minor roads is more costly than it is worth - in the grand scheme of things (see interview in ITS International Sept-Oct 2008, pp.42-43).

Ecker's take on things is that the solution lies balancing in the number of vehicles to be tolled and the lengths of road to be covered.

"The GPS/GNSS model was appropriate in Slovakia," he says. "France is planning to use satellite-based tolling and possibly Slovenia. I don't see a conflict between GPS/GNSS and DSRC; if you look at the national truck tolling project in the Czech Republic, for example, it uses DSRC but it's supposed to be GPS/ GNSS as well".