Maximizing the Potential of Road-User Charging

Road-user charging is the most immediately effective response to traffic congestion—but it offers much more besides. Once accepted, it can actually change public attitudes toward road use and encourage more environmentally sustainable transport. Indeed, its long-term potential is huge.

As the core of an integrated, interoperable demand-management system that covers multiple uses, it can help transform municipal, regional and national transport infrastructures and put them on the path to high performance. Success, however, hinges on winning public trust. And that depends on building a precise, granular system that is both easy for customers to use and brings them clear benefits as individuals. Only a holistic approach to road-user charging, customer-driven and with the right balance of technologies, can deliver such a performance-enhancing solution.

• Fare Management for Integrated Electronic Ticketing
  
  
• Organizational Strategy and Transformation in the Public Transportation Industry
  
  
• Operational Excellence in the Public Transportation Industry
  
  

Traffic congestion poses enormous threats to the world's transportation networks, the global economy, public health and environmental sustainability.

It costs the European Union around €100 billion a year—one percent of GDP. In the United States, New York alone loses an estimated US$13 billion annually in foregone economic growth. Worse still are the costs in terms of pollution, not least in the mushrooming megacities of Asia and Latin America where rates of respiratory illness are soaring. And with the number of cars set to double worldwide by 2030, these threats can only intensify.

Transport authorities are responding by starting to make drivers pay to use roads. Some of these initiatives are simply variations on old-fashioned highway-tolling schemes, which were largely designed to raise revenues for road maintenance. In and around cities, however, where the combination of economic and environmental threats from traffic congestion is most intense, a more sophisticated response is rapidly catching on: road-user charging.

When successfully implemented, road-user charging can encourage travelers to shift to alternative modes of transport and thus cut environmental pollution, improve traffic flow and management, and raise funds for investment in better transport infrastructures. Its long-term potential is even greater. 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 electronic ticketing on mass transit to parking and even retail payments.

In most geographies there are, of course, significant public concerns about privacy and civil liberties to overcome before road-user charging can be implemented. The technologies at work are by definition intrusive—but they don't have to be unacceptably so. What's more, a road-user charging system that does manage to gain public trust can leverage drivers' self-interest to achieve much broader economic and environmental goals.

Accenture has been involved in several major public transport improvement initiatives that employ aspects of successful road-user charging—the Netherlands' groundbreaking system of electronic fare collection and the transformation of customer relationship management at a national toll road operator among them.

• A clear understanding of the individual customer experience—to deliver a system that is simple, swift, secure and beneficial for all users.
  
  
• The right balance of technologies—integrated and architected on an open platform that can respond to constantly evolving customer needs.
  
  

London and other big cities have recognized the potential of road-user charging, and more and more transport authorities worldwide are poised to follow their example. All seek essentially the same goal—reduced traffic congestion. All, moreover, must find a combination of enabling technologies that not only work, but that can also overcome public suspicions about privacy, convince users that road-user charging is not just another tax and reassure local businesses in the areas affected that it won't hurt them. Yet all also have subtly different individual requirements—differences that necessitate a precise, focused approach.

Drivers want to see a fair, easy-to-use, transparent and equitable system that works for them—as individuals. That means finding applications that can deliver direct benefits in cost, convenience and service enhancement.

Advanced applications may well have the best chance of meeting these expectations in the long run, but they might not yet be completely stable. Proven technologies on the other hand, while they can probably be relied upon to work, could swiftly become obsolete—a major problem if providers hope to deliver on the long-term potential of road-user charging.

Only the right balance and integration of technologies, built on an open platform that enables a wide range of providers to plug in and offer value-added services, can respond to all these needs as they evolve. Only a travel experience tailored to individual needs will convince drivers that road-user charging is equitable. And only a system that provides both capabilities in combination can generate the data to deliver the multiple, value-added services that will retain public support into the future.

Developing such a system may challenge the mindsets of public transport authorities more used to transactional than transformational thinking. But embracing a customer-driven outlook will also yield great benefits.