Resources: Tolling and Road User Charging (RUC)
Free-flowing road user charging - for the best experience, remove those pesky road barriers. Have us take your money painlessly and electronically while you enjoy your driving day.
Love it or hate it, road user charging (RUC) is a thing. From a consumer's point of view RUC works best when driving a car on the road is just one of several options. You can avoid the RUC by avoiding the tollway and spending longer in traffic, or buying a ticket for a bus or train, or cycling or walking to your destination. RUC works best when the consumer can see that the money they are paying is going into new transport related infrastructure projects that benefit society. RUC is a nasty, pernicious tax when all the money disappears into a private corporation that announces huge profits and pays its CEO millions every year.
RUC is good idea because the private car is changing in a fundamental way. Cars that use petrol and diesel pay for roads through the tax on fossil fuels. Electric cars do not contribute in that way. They are effectively getting a free ride. As the number of electric cars increase as a proportion of all cars (and we hope it does), the tax burden falls on a diminishing cadre of vehicles. So RUC will be necessary to make this tax situation equitable. Countries are already introducing schemes to make that a reality.
Book
MLFF Tolling Systems
25 January 2022 (CC edition)
The only book in the world on MLFF tolling systems covering the principal themes of concession deeds, interoperability, road topology, tolling products, trip reconstruction and so much more.
Rupert Brown
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Paper
Tolling System Overview
3 February 2019
An introduction and overview to multilane free-flow tolling systems. This paper presents a high level architecture and describes the functions of the architectural components.
Rupert Brown
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Presentation
Congestion Charging - Cities and Systems
5 June 2019
This presentation explores cities and their congestion problems. It identifies those cities that have taken action in the form of a congestion charging scheme, and those that will probably need to soon. It presents a basic business capability model for a congestion charging system.
NeTC 2019 (Cubic)
Rupert Brown
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Presentation
A New Tolling Back Office for EastLink
12 May 2015
This presentation provides information on the project to replace the EastLink SAP based tolling back office with a new system.
NeTC 2015 (Eastlink)
Rupert Brown, Gillian Dirckze.
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Presentation
Revenue Leakage
19 September 2013
This presentation focusses on the causes of revenue leakage within a tolling system and discusses some potential ways to mitigate those losses.
ITS Summit 2013 (Eastlink)
Rupert Brown, Holman Benitez.
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