Fare Management for Road-User Charging

Traffic congestion poses serious threats to the world’s transportation networks, the global economy, public health and environmental sustainability. Which is why in and around cities where the effects of traffic congestion are felt most strongly, road or congestion charging is catching on as a means of achieving fare management for high performance.

Road charging not only dissuades drivers from driving, it can actually encourage a shift to alternative modes of transport and thus cut environmental pollution and improve traffic flow and management. What’s more, by raising funds for investment in better transport infrastructures, road charging can play an important role in cost management and improved customer service—significant issues for transport authorities that aim to achieve high performance in an economic downturn. Indeed, the long-term potential of road charging is greater still if transport authorities use it as a platform for other forms of customer-driven charging, like retail payments.

In many countries, however, there is a high level of public suspicion about road charging, and particularly about some of the technologies that enable it. Roadside infrastructure such as video is considered especially intrusive. And although the mobile positioning systems that facilitate communication between on-board units in vehicles and a central system and provide distance and zonal based pricing via “virtual” tolling points are arguably less intrusive, these technologies are not yet mature.

Related Services

• Fare Management for Integrated Electronic Ticketing
  
  

Related Research & Insights

• Maximizing the Potential of Road-User Charging

The Accenture Fare Management Solution for road charging provides a comprehensive set of functions for customer convenience, as well as the tools and architectures to allow flexibility for future services and operations.

• Flexibility is provided through the implementation of open standards, a service-oriented architecture and extensive use of Web services to extend the solution’s functionality.
  
  
• Customer convenience is delivered via multiple service channels, including self-service Web portals, interactive voice response, short message service and contact center applications. The solution also delivers interfaces to service other payment channels, including retail networks, self-service kiosks and vehicle on-board units.
  
  
• A customer relationship management capability generates customer profiles to differentiate genuine mistakes from the actions of persistent evaders.
  
  
• Enforcement services minimize the operational burden of enforcement and maximize the rate of cost-effective settlement of evasions.
  
  
• An information management and reporting suite enables detailed analysis of all critical data, with many standard reports and a tool for ad hoc report development to accommodate specific requirements.
  
  

In addition, to further enhance the flexibility and open architecture of the solution, the back office splits into two components:

• Operational Back Office—highly customized for a particular road network, collects, aggregates and rates raw transactions from the roadside to determine the appropriate charges to be sent to the commercial back office for settlement. The resulting charges must influence user behavior in line with the road-charging system’s objectives. They must also be inclusive and fair for all users.
  
  
• Commercial Back Office—provides customer account management, device (on-board unit) management and enforcement services, and has a one-to-many relationship with operational back office systems, providing a single point of contact for the customer and maintaining a central service for all customer accounts and system financial management.
  
  

Maximizing the reuse of these services can greatly assist in maximizing the return on investment, reduce the complexity of maintaining multiple systems and assist in minimizing operational costs.

The long-term potential of road-user charging is phenomenal. Not only can transport authorities use the granular customer information generated by road-user charging to continually improve services, they can actually turn the system into a platform for other forms of customer-driven charging, from e-ticketing on mass transit to parking and even retail payments. To learn more download Maximizing the Potential of Road-User Charging. [PDF, 665KB]

To be successful, road-charging systems must be able to:

• Gain user trust by ensuring reliability and convenience
• Adapt to future technologies by ensuring flexibility
  
  

The Accenture Fare Management Solution for road charging provides just such a comprehensive set of functions for customer convenience, as well as the tools and architectures to allow flexibility for future services and operations.