I can be lazy and you can still have a good read.
2009/12/29
2009/12/28
What’s a government to do?
I have been describing satellite (GPS)-based multi-function payment telematics that encompass road-tolling, parking metering and pay-as-you-drive insurance since 2003. First in patents filings, then at EU conferences then, starting in 2005 in the EU trade press, and in my blog (grushhour.com) since 2007 (this one is fun) and now in keynote speeches at transportation conferences and workshops in North America.
A reader recently asked: “How best can the government facilitate the development of private sector ‘multi-function payment telematics’?” A critical question, indeed.
The Government has two critical roles to play.
The first is to support standards in order to protect consumers, which in this case of road-use payment telematics encompasses users (drivers) and payment operators (toll operators, parking operators, insurance companies). This will include interoperability, communication interfaces, privacy, charging reliability, security, and evidentiary weight for non-repudiation. The International Standards Organization via its European partner, CEN, is addressing these standards now. Only one American regularly participates. More are needed.
The second is encourage voluntary use of telemetric devices for parking and insurance, ostensibly while waiting for policy and planning to be ready for GNSS-based road-tolling. One way this can be done is to encourage municipalities to permit programs for voluntary parking payment via GNSS meters. More detail on this, below.
Another way voluntary use can be encouraged is by permitting PAYD insurance programs in jurisdictions where legislation still lags, or by mandating that a gradually increasing percentage of insurance files be converted to PAYD. There are also a significant number of ways to meter and charge for PAYD insurance and the ones that use pay-by-use telematics are the most fair. These can be encouraged through subsidies to municipalities that partner with insurance companies to bundle parking and insurance on the same meter. The attraction here is that once a few thousand vehicles in a municipality or megaregion are equipped for parking, then an insurance company can offer PAYD premiums to those motorists without consideration for developing a telematics system, since it would already be in place.
Still another way to encourage use is to permit users of these new devices to pay existing RFID tolls on the same bill, since these systems can be set to identify the identical tolling amounts. Those highways for which the tolling authority is a government could consider a small discount, as further motivation.
Of course, if these municipalities and megaregions were to offer rewards of, say, parking-payment credits, to vehicles that did not move during peak hours, or were small, or were electric, or were driven very efficiently (hypermiling), or were driven less often, and if municipalities permitted local business improvement associations (BIAs) to offer loyalty rewards to frequent shoppers in the form of parking credits, this would further develop this new metering sector as it would reward users who subscribe to metering services.
So the short answer to the question “How best can the government facilitate the development of private sector ‘multi-function payment telematics’?” is simple to permit demand to be created by removing restrictions and encouraging the shift. Soon after would follow numerous competitors. Here is what some of them would look like.
Now to return to parking – by far my favorite congestion-related subject.
The advantages of satellite-based parking for a municipality are:
The advantages of satellite-based parking for a driver are:
The steps a municipal government must take to permit satellite-based parking:
Everyone wins. No political suicide.
~~~~~
Here is an sample roadmap for a megaregion to introduce Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) metering for a million or more vehicles. Click on image to enlarge.
A reader recently asked: “How best can the government facilitate the development of private sector ‘multi-function payment telematics’?” A critical question, indeed.
The Government has two critical roles to play.
The first is to support standards in order to protect consumers, which in this case of road-use payment telematics encompasses users (drivers) and payment operators (toll operators, parking operators, insurance companies). This will include interoperability, communication interfaces, privacy, charging reliability, security, and evidentiary weight for non-repudiation. The International Standards Organization via its European partner, CEN, is addressing these standards now. Only one American regularly participates. More are needed.
The second is encourage voluntary use of telemetric devices for parking and insurance, ostensibly while waiting for policy and planning to be ready for GNSS-based road-tolling. One way this can be done is to encourage municipalities to permit programs for voluntary parking payment via GNSS meters. More detail on this, below.
Another way voluntary use can be encouraged is by permitting PAYD insurance programs in jurisdictions where legislation still lags, or by mandating that a gradually increasing percentage of insurance files be converted to PAYD. There are also a significant number of ways to meter and charge for PAYD insurance and the ones that use pay-by-use telematics are the most fair. These can be encouraged through subsidies to municipalities that partner with insurance companies to bundle parking and insurance on the same meter. The attraction here is that once a few thousand vehicles in a municipality or megaregion are equipped for parking, then an insurance company can offer PAYD premiums to those motorists without consideration for developing a telematics system, since it would already be in place.
Still another way to encourage use is to permit users of these new devices to pay existing RFID tolls on the same bill, since these systems can be set to identify the identical tolling amounts. Those highways for which the tolling authority is a government could consider a small discount, as further motivation.
Of course, if these municipalities and megaregions were to offer rewards of, say, parking-payment credits, to vehicles that did not move during peak hours, or were small, or were electric, or were driven very efficiently (hypermiling), or were driven less often, and if municipalities permitted local business improvement associations (BIAs) to offer loyalty rewards to frequent shoppers in the form of parking credits, this would further develop this new metering sector as it would reward users who subscribe to metering services.
So the short answer to the question “How best can the government facilitate the development of private sector ‘multi-function payment telematics’?” is simple to permit demand to be created by removing restrictions and encouraging the shift. Soon after would follow numerous competitors. Here is what some of them would look like.
~~~~~
Now to return to parking – by far my favorite congestion-related subject.
The advantages of satellite-based parking for a municipality are:
- Infrastructure costs are reduced which enables expansion of managed parking.
- Enforcement costs are reduced permitting the same parking officers to manage an expanded area of municipal parking.
- Citations for meter violations can be replaced with graduated pricing, reducing enforcement labor per parking spot, court backlogs and court services costs, while raising revenue and net revenue.
- The reduction of underpriced or unpriced parking reduces urban street congestion.
The advantages of satellite-based parking for a driver are:
- No need to pay each time you park.
- Pay only for the minutes used.
- Can overstay without ticket-anxiety.
- No parking tickets for expired meters.
- Expense management for business users (note that parking payments may be a business expense, while a parking citation is generally not).
- Able to purchase PAYD insurance (to save money).
- Able to pay existing (and new!) road-tolls with the same device.
The steps a municipal government must take to permit satellite-based parking:
- Permit one or more satellite-parking operators to meter and collect payment for your municipal parking spaces, lots and garages.
- Prepare pricemaps of the parking facilities. These are geographic locations (labeled polygons) with associated times and prices. Give these to the satellite-parking operator(s).
- Promote the service to your residents, especially to those receiving parking tickets, since those drivers generally find parking payment systems (which include payment of citations) to be bothersome. (Stick a service offer under the wiper with the ticket!)
- Do not ticket satellite-parking users for meter violations. Use graduated pricing instead. This should be set for the municipality to be able to encourage short-term parking to remain short, while appreciating the same net revenue as before.
- Offer a startup incentive such a credit on account for the first several hundred users.
- Design rewards for drivers to encourage both less driving and the use of satellite-based, in-car meters.
Everyone wins. No political suicide.
~~~~~
Here is an sample roadmap for a megaregion to introduce Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) metering for a million or more vehicles. Click on image to enlarge.
2009/12/26
Breaking the mold
Thinking about universal road tolling for those who are not planning, designing, or making policy for it, is often very simple. Most opinions are one of: “not-on-my-roads”, “big-brother” or “it’s inevitable”.
For those working or thinking about this all day, issues range from acceptance, cost containment, economic effects, economic efficiency, enforcement, fairness, how to get started, privacy protection, what prices to set, what technology to use, when to start, which roads/areas to price, and many more. The considerations that need to be addressed are even more numerous and far more nuanced than this, and as with any program that meets with social and political resistance, one can imagine how difficult a mandated transition could become.
So far the history of GNSS-tolling has been government driven. A few EU countries have mandated countrywide truck tolling, usually on limited access highways. Germany’s GNSS-based truck-tolling system is the most matured example, although we can expect three more countries to join them during the 2010-12 period.
In the United States, the history of GNSS-tolling systems has been one of pilots and trials, such as in Oregon, Puget Sound and the current Iowa trial set in several US cities. More government initiatives.
To date, a government writes a request for proposals (RFP), companies submit tenders and an operational system (Germany) or a pilot (Oregon, etc) results. This government-led approach has four effects:
We have started providing road-use meters to drivers in Winnipeg for use as parking meters a couple of weeks ago. This commercial approach is a first in the world. By that I mean, a private company is deploying satellite-based metering and fee collection on a voluntary basis for automobiles without government mandate (as was the case in Germany) or without a disposable and expensive pilot (as in Oregon, PSRC or Iowa). This system is a commercial system that will stay and grow if successful or wither and die if not. The government helps by providing parking pricemaps (locations and payment rules), telling its residents it is available (this marketing expense is perhaps the most substantial expense) and providing a few weeks of free parking and helping early adopters with a device down payment to get the project kicked off. We are able to keep some of the parking revenues which is expected to be more than offset by the City's ability to reduce enforcement costs and expand the range of parking-enforced areas.
The result is happier drivers, lower operating and enforcement cost per metered spot, enablement of expanded parking management at little cost, and most importantly experience with GNSS-based payment telematics that both governments and drivers sorely need to overcome fears and to see benefits. Our users are drivers who seek the convenience of not paying at a parking meter and the guarantee of no "parking tickets" (we simply graduate the fee upward as their stay overruns).
Here is one way to think about this approach to reduce or remove system costs for tolling the United States (this will be published in a month or so).
Here is how I thought Steve Jobs might approach the problem of an in-car meter.
For those working or thinking about this all day, issues range from acceptance, cost containment, economic effects, economic efficiency, enforcement, fairness, how to get started, privacy protection, what prices to set, what technology to use, when to start, which roads/areas to price, and many more. The considerations that need to be addressed are even more numerous and far more nuanced than this, and as with any program that meets with social and political resistance, one can imagine how difficult a mandated transition could become.
So far the history of GNSS-tolling has been government driven. A few EU countries have mandated countrywide truck tolling, usually on limited access highways. Germany’s GNSS-based truck-tolling system is the most matured example, although we can expect three more countries to join them during the 2010-12 period.
In the United States, the history of GNSS-tolling systems has been one of pilots and trials, such as in Oregon, Puget Sound and the current Iowa trial set in several US cities. More government initiatives.
To date, a government writes a request for proposals (RFP), companies submit tenders and an operational system (Germany) or a pilot (Oregon, etc) results. This government-led approach has four effects:
- Established companies wait in anticipation for large government contracts; but during that wait, the impetus for innovation is non-existent.
- Innovation, when it is unleashed, is bounded by the RFPs, which are generally written by consultants or bureaucrats familiar, perhaps, with knowledge of past pilots or something tried by one or more EU countries. Imagination may be bounded by the catalogue of work completed.
- Solutions are limited to single-functions because bureaucracies are stove-piped (road and parking people exchange few ideas, for example).
- Governments view transportation as a core economic management function upon which rests productivity-related movements of goods and people, and for which taxes must be raised and managed; hence, the requirements of collection and enforcement will trump the opportunities for service and value to the motorist. (This last point is becoming an increasingly sensitive issue as the social view of motorists begins to degrade as did the social perception of the smoker during the past 2 decades.* This effect, generally overlooked, will make migration to per-use payment more difficult as drivers will tend to feel harassed rather than served.)
* Notice that automotive manufacturers generally address motorists in one way, while toll collection authorities do so in another. It does not have to be this way. Road Authorities provide critical and valuable services – why not sell them as a benefit? At least two European manufacturers of multi-function tolling and payment systems, Kapsch and Q-Free, pitch lifestyle choices of convenience, and non-stop driving.
We have started providing road-use meters to drivers in Winnipeg for use as parking meters a couple of weeks ago. This commercial approach is a first in the world. By that I mean, a private company is deploying satellite-based metering and fee collection on a voluntary basis for automobiles without government mandate (as was the case in Germany) or without a disposable and expensive pilot (as in Oregon, PSRC or Iowa). This system is a commercial system that will stay and grow if successful or wither and die if not. The government helps by providing parking pricemaps (locations and payment rules), telling its residents it is available (this marketing expense is perhaps the most substantial expense) and providing a few weeks of free parking and helping early adopters with a device down payment to get the project kicked off. We are able to keep some of the parking revenues which is expected to be more than offset by the City's ability to reduce enforcement costs and expand the range of parking-enforced areas.
The result is happier drivers, lower operating and enforcement cost per metered spot, enablement of expanded parking management at little cost, and most importantly experience with GNSS-based payment telematics that both governments and drivers sorely need to overcome fears and to see benefits. Our users are drivers who seek the convenience of not paying at a parking meter and the guarantee of no "parking tickets" (we simply graduate the fee upward as their stay overruns).
Here is one way to think about this approach to reduce or remove system costs for tolling the United States (this will be published in a month or so).
Here is how I thought Steve Jobs might approach the problem of an in-car meter.
2009/12/22
The road to proper pricing is not as bumpy as you think
On Wednesday, December 16, 2009, Maarten van Biezen and Chris Nobel from The Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment, who would be certain advocates for the Dutch intention to price all road use, reported some concerns in an article called “The road to good charging can often be bumpy”
Their article, reprinted here without permission, is important and needs comment. I usually comment on articles from journalists that do not understand the importance and fairness of this tax-shift, but Messers van Biezen and Nobel do understand, but have provided some undue admonishment to their government.
Their article, reprinted here without permission, is important and needs comment. I usually comment on articles from journalists that do not understand the importance and fairness of this tax-shift, but Messers van Biezen and Nobel do understand, but have provided some undue admonishment to their government.
The idea of basing motoring taxation on the distance a vehicle is driven – generally known these days as a 'kilometre charge' – is in principle a good one which environmental groups have advocated for years. But as recent developments in the Netherlands have shown, the road to good charging can often be a bumpy one.The statement that “the unacceptable effect of abolishing the registration tax will be that cars become less fuel-efficient” is most likely a typo. The authors likely meant “the unacceptable effect of abolishing the road tax will be that cars become less fuel-efficient”. However, the Dutch government has wisely left the fuel tax in place (I think that is what the authors refer to as “road tax”, with apologies if I am wrong). So this fear of drivers reverting to gas guzzlers because of this tax-shift is completely unfounded. The opposite will occur. To consider further, the registration tax, which is quite high in most EU countries including the Netherlands is paid regardless of distance-traveled. A high fixed tax would require that a person thinking to extract the maximum value from his or her purchase would then drive as much as possible. Hence the economic argument (proven correct many times) is that charging by usage instead of by vehicle purchase price reduces driving. What a high purchase price means is that fewer people can afford a vehicle, but those that can will prefer to drive over almost any other alternative.
A number of countries have talked about a kilometre charge, and some – notably Germany and Switzerland – have introduced charging for goods transported by road. But the Netherlands want to become the first European country to implement such a charge for private car drivers following last month's proposals put to the Dutch parliament. This is indeed a historic move that should be welcomed.
But, the devil is in the detail. There are four significant things that should change in the proposed Dutch charge.
Firstly, the kilometre charge will replace the existing road tax and vehicle registration (or purchase) tax, and the amount of money raised by the kilometre charge must not exceed the combined income of the two taxes being replaced. The idea is that motorists will pay for using their vehicles rather than owning them, but registration or purchase taxes encourage the introduction of low-CO2 technology. Therefore the unacceptable effect of abolishing the registration tax will be that cars become less fuel-efficient. If the expected 15% reduction in kilometres driven does not materialise, we end up emitting more CO2.
Secondly, the prospect of having regionally differentiated congestion fees is still unclear. The proposal makes a congestion charge possible after the full introduction of the kilometre charge (2018-2020), but it does not specify how such a charge should diminish congestion and new road building. If you don't charge people more for where their vehicles do most damage - and congestion is one of the negative impacts of too many vehicles on the road - then the charging system does not achieve its objective of steering mobility in an environmentally, and economically, better direction.The authors are correct that charging by time and place of use is critical to congestion management. The Dutch government knows this and intends to introduce time-distance-place charging (TDP). “Charge maps” will not have been disclosed, because this takes time and negotiation. Since I have not seen these maps I cannot comment on them, but if the Dutch government charges a single flat rate and does not move to TDP charging shortly into the program, I will eat my hat as well as those of Messers van Biezen and Nobel. What needs to be done now is to guard that the charge maps will be designed in a transparent and easy-to-understand manner. Drivers need to be able to easily see how much a trip will cost in advance (similar to ask a taxi driver before you get in) and to not be surprised at the final calculation. Drivers also need to easily determine the cost difference of taking a trip at various times of the day, so that they may plan to avoid high tolls. Avoiding high tolls is the whole point of the program!
Thirdly, the government proposes to cap the total revenue at €6.6bn (2007 price levels). This has been much less widely reported than the proposed maximum charge of €0.067 per km. If the current proposal becomes law, the charge will begin at €0.03 in 2012 and rise steadily to its maximum by 2018. The capping of total revenue means that if mobility increases, the price per kilometre will fall! This would undermine the core objective of the law – a more conscious use of mobility - and will make environmental objectives harder to achieve. It should change.Capping total revenue makes sense on a relative basis. These programs are about congestion cessation and collecting more than is needed for that purpose or for fair-funding purposes is inappropriate for nurturing user acceptance and trust. However, because we might guess that the underlying demand for mobility will increase, and because of normal inflation, an absolute fixed ceiling would indeed be an error. The reason that the United States has Highway finding problems now is that fuel-taxes are unindexed so that they are an increasingly smaller pool for funding our highways. I realize that the authors are congestion/emission focused rather than funding focused, but the analogy holds AND the two issues (congestion and funding) are strongly correlated.
Finally, the government proposes lower charges for trucks than for cars. As a result of the pledge not to raise average taxes for each category of vehicles, the proposed maximum charge for trucks will be only 2.4 cents per kilometre. In other countries trucks pay rates of 15 to 80 cents per km. You would pay less for driving a truck to the beach than driving your car.This is most likely a temporary measure requiring the logistics industry to adjust its prices. Truck tolls should rise, as well, which have a very positive effect on fleet efficiency. The number of trucks that have been replaced or updated in Germany because of lower tolls for cleaner vehicles is astounding (this needs reference!) Remember, the person who is really paying truck tolls is the person eating the food or using the iPod that was transported by the truck. Raising both at the same time would cause additional economic ripples that a private vehicle driver may not want. You don't want to pay more for road use AND more when you eat at the same time! This kind of driver-thinking shows an anti-truck bias, which is not different from drivers who display anti-bicycle bias. We are all in this together.
There are times when we have to accept some Realpolitik, and when a new form of charging is being introduced, perhaps this is one time. But the danger of accepting a compromise to get a new form of taxation through the legislative process is that, when it comes into effect, it does not solve the problems it is supposed to solve, which can give the public a negative view of what should be a positive form of charging. That's why the Dutch government better try to get the scheme right, rather than make political concessions that could ruin it in the long term.I think that the Dutch Government is VERY sensitive to “getting the scheme right”. I predict they will be very close, and with intelligent program design will be able to adjust in the first couple of years. They cannot be expected to make large changes after the first week any more that they can be expected to optimize perfectly for every driver type and every vehicle type and every trip type. I applaud the Dutch Government for its tenacity, diligence and courage.
2009/12/12
Smart Mobility getting noticed as Cleantech
2009 is the year that smart mobility got noticed as a clean technology. I have complained here before that technology to reduce consumption (things such as road use at congested times, repeated circling to find cheap parking, or pay-as-you-drive insurance), had been overlooked until recently. This is changing.
At the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), in the first week of December 2009, Skymeter placed in the CIX Top 20 and took top spot in the Clean Tech Individual Heat.
Below, you can see Skymeter’s CEO, Kamal Hassan (unrelated to the famous Bollywood star!), is looking the part, too. His firm was named twice earlier in the year. In March, IDC Canada named Skymeter one of '10 Canadian Green IT Companies to Watch', and in October, the Corporate Knights named Skymeter as one of the Cleantech 'Next 10' Emerging Companies.
These awards and mentions were hard-won by Hassan, who was repeatedly rebuffed by clean-tech venture throughout 2006-2008, because there had been no ‘category’ for technologies that mitigate travel demand, rather only for technologies that made the same or more happen more cleanly. According to Justin Horner, transportation policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, 14% of total (US) emissions come from light duty vehicles. Reducing that number, he said in a discussion about PAYD insurance requires three critical components for cleaner automotive travel: lower emission cars, cleaner fuels, and fewer miles traveled. The third leg, demand reduction, has been missing from green-investor baskets until now.
So how does Hassan’s Skymeter technology do this? By enabling governments to make road use payments and parking use payments visible to drivers rather than hidden in other forms of taxes such as property, income, sales or fuel, pay-as-you-go technology permits a shift in awareness which is well known to translate into avoidance of travel at congested times and places. Such a shift reduces single-occupancy-vehicle travel at rush hour and replaces it with other modalities such as time shifting, carpooling, transit, walking, biking, telework, trip chaining, and even moving closer to work. The drop in traffic volume and emissions level is usually around 15-25%, depending on price levels and available alternatives.
Pundit, Nicholas Parker, Executive Chairman of, Cleantech Group, predicted 10 new trends for 2010:
One of these trends describes exactly where Skymeter plays:
At the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), in the first week of December 2009, Skymeter placed in the CIX Top 20 and took top spot in the Clean Tech Individual Heat.
Below, you can see Skymeter’s CEO, Kamal Hassan (unrelated to the famous Bollywood star!), is looking the part, too. His firm was named twice earlier in the year. In March, IDC Canada named Skymeter one of '10 Canadian Green IT Companies to Watch', and in October, the Corporate Knights named Skymeter as one of the Cleantech 'Next 10' Emerging Companies.
These awards and mentions were hard-won by Hassan, who was repeatedly rebuffed by clean-tech venture throughout 2006-2008, because there had been no ‘category’ for technologies that mitigate travel demand, rather only for technologies that made the same or more happen more cleanly. According to Justin Horner, transportation policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, 14% of total (US) emissions come from light duty vehicles. Reducing that number, he said in a discussion about PAYD insurance requires three critical components for cleaner automotive travel: lower emission cars, cleaner fuels, and fewer miles traveled. The third leg, demand reduction, has been missing from green-investor baskets until now.
So how does Hassan’s Skymeter technology do this? By enabling governments to make road use payments and parking use payments visible to drivers rather than hidden in other forms of taxes such as property, income, sales or fuel, pay-as-you-go technology permits a shift in awareness which is well known to translate into avoidance of travel at congested times and places. Such a shift reduces single-occupancy-vehicle travel at rush hour and replaces it with other modalities such as time shifting, carpooling, transit, walking, biking, telework, trip chaining, and even moving closer to work. The drop in traffic volume and emissions level is usually around 15-25%, depending on price levels and available alternatives.
~~~~~
Pundit, Nicholas Parker, Executive Chairman of, Cleantech Group, predicted 10 new trends for 2010:
One of these trends describes exactly where Skymeter plays:
Electric cars take the back seat to smart mobility
In 2009, electric vehicles and hybrids eclipsed fuel cell vehicles as the undeniable new center of gravity of the auto industry. Virtually every car company in Asia, Europe and North America announced ambitious clean car strategies, and many brought new models to market, in addition to startups funded by venture capitalists.
In 2010, clean cars will form part of a broader shift to smart mobility. Smart mobility will quickly permeate beyond simply the transport sector, and will be integrated into the new energy paradigm and influence the design of urban systems, even shipping ports. Look increasingly in 2010 for eco-city designs based on concepts such as “new urbanism.” Leading governments around the world will rethink tax systems, fiscal incentives and budgets to encourage greener forms of work and transport based on smart mobility concepts (SNCF, the French state-owned rail operator, set up a fund in 2009 specifically to invest in e-mobility.) [emphasis added]
2009/12/10
How to toll a country for free
It is now possible to address all user fees, charges, taxes and insurance premiums paid by motorists for road and parking use in a single, transparent payment management system. This permits a government that employs this technology to obtain road tolling as a free service riding on a broader service suite of GNSS-mediated parking management, pay-as-you-go insurance and mobility credits and rewards. In other words, allow profitable, value-added services to fund system operational costs of road tolling, on the same business model that Google funds certain free services to Internet users from its advertising services. Here is how.
Increasingly, countries, states, regions and cities are considering tolling all or most roads in their jurisdiction. Why they wish to do this may be related to congestion, pollution, or sustainable funding and is discussed in many other articles and reports. Here, we assume the reader knows this process has started and will likely complete, worldwide, between 2020 and 2025. There are many commitments to deploy related systems in the next 3 to 5 years, some already legislated or in progress.
There are three usage-based, mobility-related payments that motorists must make when using their vehicles: parking payments, insurance payments and road-use payments.
Parking payments, when a payment is due, may be made at the beginning or end of a parking event, with the assistance of a person or a machine and sometimes only monthly in the form of the purchase of a monthly pass near a work location. Parking payments are variable, a nuisance to make, and costly to collect. They are managed with petty and annoying fines for non-payment or meter expiry. Parking payment management is a complex, costly, wasteful, frequently mismanaged and a somewhat absurd municipal activity. Underpriced parking is common, a principle cause of undersupply and, in consequence, a leading contributor to traffic congestion in our cities as drivers circle streets repeatedly to find an available spot. In many circumstances, the act of payment of street-curb parking is far more painful to drivers than is the actual expenditure itself. Drivers would do well to be relieved of this nuisance. Cities would do well to increase the volume of such revenues collected while simultaneously reducing the expense of its collection. A halving of this expense ratio, often calculated at well over 50%, would retain large sums already paid by motorists in municipal coffers in most cities worldwide.
Automobile insurance payments are made annually, monthly and sometimes occasionally when renting a car. Premiums may be determined by address, driving record, gender, self-declaration of average distance traveled, and possibly other demographic variables, but almost never by the most important indicator of risk – actual distance traveled. While a more costly payment than a single parking payment for urban dwellers, the usually overpriced insurance payment amounts to a lesser total annual expense than the usually underpriced parking expense. There are many reason for this odd payment misbalance, again well discussed in many other articles and papers. A critical problem in automotive insurance is that over-payers, who drive less than they pay for, subsidize under-payers, who drive more than they pay for. The recommended solution to this problem, known as pay-as-you-drive insurance ideally charges motorists an amount equitably measured to the amount of distance traveled and weighted by effective demographic variables and/or driving record). It is repeatedly reported that PAYD insurance, reduces mileage traveled, saves households money, improves safety, assigns risk more equitably, rewards non-SOV mobility and reduces congestion.
Road use payments are made in a variety of ways: fuel taxes, vehicle registration taxes, tire taxes and road tolls may be supplemented in many jurisdictions by property taxes, sales taxes and monies allocated from general public funds. The number and amount of these payments are hardly understood by most motorists. In some European jurisdictions, taxes charged against fuel use and ownership of an automobile overpay road expenses, while in North American jurisdictions, these taxes are too little to pay road expenses. In Canada, there is a 29% shortfall in these taxes for its highway systems, while urban streets and roads in Ontario’s cities, such as Toronto, are largely paid by property taxes generating unfairness and some animosity between internal residents with high property taxes and residents of surrounding municipalities with lower property taxes who use Toronto’s streets to drive in for work. In the US states, collection of fuel taxes pay between 50% and 90% of the expense creating what many consider a pressing funding crisis. There is a more fundamental problem in the way motorists make road-use payments: most of it is invisible to motorists and many payments (such as property tax paid by someone who uses non-SOV modalities) form cross-subsidies. These payments are essentially unrelated to how much, where or when a driver chooses to drive and is a principle contributor to emission volumes and congestion on all road types.
Transparent, simple and frequent pricing signals would alter motorists perception of the social cost of driving at certain times and in certain places. The point made here is that the parking, insurance, and road-use payments we make, whether sufficient in aggregate or not, are remarkably inefficient economically. They provide no signal to motorists as to the social cost incurred by choosing when and where to drive. The act of driving a motorized vehicle, which has innumerable social, personal and commercial benefits is confounded by the choice and when and where to drive so that the social and personal benefits are partially and sometimes completely negated by an equivalent set of social, personal and commercial harms. If these three payment categories – parking, insurance and roads – were each fairly calculated relative to use, transparently visible to the motorist and with payment made effortlessly (debt and credit) and frequently (monthly), this would have the greatest single impact on decisions contributing to automotive usage demand.
There is now a single, unified, payment technology, based on in-car telematics, that measures exact use of parking, insurance and roads, scaled to vehicle type as well as to time and place of usage that permits governments and insurance companies to set and collect per-use charges in this fairer, more transparent way. This technology, standardized by ISO/CEN and under development in both Europe and North America, is a new generation of tolling technology that can be deployed wirelessly and requires no ground or curb-side infrastructure. Mobile spot-checking is still needed, but can be done far more cheaply than now because cost is shareable over all three sectors.
I opened this article pointing out that many governments are considering tolling all or most roads in their jurisdiction. These governments are correctly focused on the immediate culprit in transport demand problems: transport demand due to mispricing. Unfortunately, the effects of underpriced parking and mispriced insurance, while harder to fathom, are also not only underappreciated as causes of congestion, but form an opportunity for demand management via price correction far greater than does price correction to road pricing.
Gradually correcting all three payment regimes, even if expense-neutral in aggregate to each motorist, would generate powerful economic signals to that motorist. There are few things that garner attention like money.
Managing all three payments via a single system reduces the cost of that payment system. The cost of consumer-banking credit and debit systems is under 2% or 3% of money exchanged because of optimized system management, risk management, payment security, and payment volume. The current cost of road tolling payment management systems range from 20% to 40% of revenues and the cost of parking payment management systems can be twice that. Optimizing collection management, even ignoring the benefits of travel demand management, would conserve, in aggregate, many millions and for larger countries billions, of dollars per year for national, regional and municipal treasuries. Even leaving every motorist expense neutral would leave governments revenue positive. The extent of current system waste, redundancy and pricing misallocation is that high.
Where can we get started? Because motorists are more accustomed to parking payment than to road tolling, a program to redress urban parking underpayment over two or three years would meet with less motorist (voter!) resistance than a program of tolling existing roads or highways. If politicians were to apply market economics, this is an easier place to do so.
Driver behaviour is influenced by parking payment. Large payment differentials between on-street and off-street parking prices causes drivers to seek to minimize payment. Availability of free or under-priced street parking means avoidance of correctly-priced off-street parking. This alone generates a significant amount of inner-urban congestion as cars circle repeatedly to find cheap parking spots while passing up nearby garages that are priced higher. This also reduces incentive to invest in garage construction that would move these cars off street making room for pedestrians and bikes.
Market-priced management of urban street parking also reduces inter-urban and arterial congestion since it removes under-priced parking. Until now parking management systems have made this impossible because curb-side parking management is expensive, it can only be provided in area of greatest demand. This is a “long-tail” phenomena and works as follows.
Certain areas of a city experience high demand for parking. In those areas, the cost of parking management systems is less than the revenue that can be demanded for parking there. A municipal decision to charge for street parking is a local demand management decision predicated on charging slightly more that the amount needed to be able to pay the expenses of the requisite management system. A small surplus is taken to be sure the system expense does not become a financial burden to the city.
This is less of a profit-decision than could be taken by many municipal authorities. Rather many of these authorities are simply asking: “Can we afford to deploy a system to restrict parking to two-hours by charging a small amount that is sufficient to pay for meters so that we can in turn force compliance via issuing citations for meter violations?”
The answer for high-demand areas is: “yes!” Hence those areas get meters, but prices are set lower than market value because commercial interests argue that parking pricing hurts business. While this is demonstrably not always true (in fact the opposite is true in some circumstances), it can be true when free or cheaper parking is available in the next business district – i.e., when a motorist has an equally satisfying shopping, dining or entertainment choice away from priced parking.
Hence to make market-pricing work we need pricing management to be far more pervasive than now. Unfortunately, the per-spot expense of metering becomes prohibitive as soon as demand drops off. Hence while we can price modestly, or in rare circumstances, even sensibly in some high-demand urban areas, we cannot do so economically on the shoulders of those areas. This creates real or perceived disadvantages for commercial interests in competition with businesses outside of those shoulders, and suppresses parking payments that could be sensibly demanded, making it infeasible to deploy parking demand management systems outside relatively dense municipal areas, leaving these areas for free-parking, sign limited parking and tire-marking. Hence under-priced parking is baked in as a consequence of high management-system costs. Demand density dictates feasibility in the same way that density influences transit feasibility.
If the per-spot expense-ratio for parking payment management were the same for every parking spot in a city or region, and was a small fraction of current costs, these disparities would disappear. New in-car telematics-based payment systems do this.
More important than the simple argument that lower system costs would make parking management more available to municipalities, this technology unlocks a vast pent-up demand for parking management, which has associated with it the revenue that would fund system costs for region-wide and country-wide road tolling.
The net, combined expense to a motorist for paying for parking, road-use and insurance, on a single system can be arranged to leave a motorist expense-neutral, while providing cost transparency, privacy and convenience.
The net savings in payment management systems for all three can leave an increased revenue margin to governments that can be used to neutralize the expense of new country-wide road tolling programs.
How can we get started? Begin by tolling for parking, under a regime wherein there is a gradual schedule of growth in number of spots-under-management. Use the technology advantages to simultaneously reduce manage expenses and to manage areas that were not feasible to manage before. This program and technology combination allows the same enforcement staff compliment to manage two or three times more spots. There is no need to reduce staff in circumstances where parking management will expand.
Permit the payment system operator who is servicing a voluntary population of motorists to sell additional value-added services such as PAYD insurance, parking services for private parking operators and parking finders and the like.
Arrange for this payment service provider to provide road-tolling billing services for those voluntary motorists who would be billed for variable (TDP) road-tolls while receiving credits for fuel taxes (or other taxes) as calculated by the same telematics system. Specifically, this payment services program would be set up so that sufficient revenues are generated from value-added services to permit the payment system operator to provide the road-use billing-feed free of charge to a tolling authority.
This system would first attract users for whom the value of the additional services and fairness of the balancing tax rebates would permit the shift to be perceived as valuable. As value added services increase in value, costs decline, and this approach becomes more acceptable, more motorists will join voluntarily.
The schedule to move the motorist population to this new system could be expected to take three to five years. As the service suite expands the service becomes increasingly attractive until such point that the government can announce a final rollout to all vehicles.
This approach leaves government in control of the switchover schedule, allows motorists to subscribe voluntarily, and allows system revenues to self-fund the system, meaning that government needs very little investment to get the system seeded and has the option to allocate zero operational expenses to the road-tolling portion of the system.
Increasingly, countries, states, regions and cities are considering tolling all or most roads in their jurisdiction. Why they wish to do this may be related to congestion, pollution, or sustainable funding and is discussed in many other articles and reports. Here, we assume the reader knows this process has started and will likely complete, worldwide, between 2020 and 2025. There are many commitments to deploy related systems in the next 3 to 5 years, some already legislated or in progress.
There are three usage-based, mobility-related payments that motorists must make when using their vehicles: parking payments, insurance payments and road-use payments.
Parking payments, when a payment is due, may be made at the beginning or end of a parking event, with the assistance of a person or a machine and sometimes only monthly in the form of the purchase of a monthly pass near a work location. Parking payments are variable, a nuisance to make, and costly to collect. They are managed with petty and annoying fines for non-payment or meter expiry. Parking payment management is a complex, costly, wasteful, frequently mismanaged and a somewhat absurd municipal activity. Underpriced parking is common, a principle cause of undersupply and, in consequence, a leading contributor to traffic congestion in our cities as drivers circle streets repeatedly to find an available spot. In many circumstances, the act of payment of street-curb parking is far more painful to drivers than is the actual expenditure itself. Drivers would do well to be relieved of this nuisance. Cities would do well to increase the volume of such revenues collected while simultaneously reducing the expense of its collection. A halving of this expense ratio, often calculated at well over 50%, would retain large sums already paid by motorists in municipal coffers in most cities worldwide.
Automobile insurance payments are made annually, monthly and sometimes occasionally when renting a car. Premiums may be determined by address, driving record, gender, self-declaration of average distance traveled, and possibly other demographic variables, but almost never by the most important indicator of risk – actual distance traveled. While a more costly payment than a single parking payment for urban dwellers, the usually overpriced insurance payment amounts to a lesser total annual expense than the usually underpriced parking expense. There are many reason for this odd payment misbalance, again well discussed in many other articles and papers. A critical problem in automotive insurance is that over-payers, who drive less than they pay for, subsidize under-payers, who drive more than they pay for. The recommended solution to this problem, known as pay-as-you-drive insurance ideally charges motorists an amount equitably measured to the amount of distance traveled and weighted by effective demographic variables and/or driving record). It is repeatedly reported that PAYD insurance, reduces mileage traveled, saves households money, improves safety, assigns risk more equitably, rewards non-SOV mobility and reduces congestion.
Road use payments are made in a variety of ways: fuel taxes, vehicle registration taxes, tire taxes and road tolls may be supplemented in many jurisdictions by property taxes, sales taxes and monies allocated from general public funds. The number and amount of these payments are hardly understood by most motorists. In some European jurisdictions, taxes charged against fuel use and ownership of an automobile overpay road expenses, while in North American jurisdictions, these taxes are too little to pay road expenses. In Canada, there is a 29% shortfall in these taxes for its highway systems, while urban streets and roads in Ontario’s cities, such as Toronto, are largely paid by property taxes generating unfairness and some animosity between internal residents with high property taxes and residents of surrounding municipalities with lower property taxes who use Toronto’s streets to drive in for work. In the US states, collection of fuel taxes pay between 50% and 90% of the expense creating what many consider a pressing funding crisis. There is a more fundamental problem in the way motorists make road-use payments: most of it is invisible to motorists and many payments (such as property tax paid by someone who uses non-SOV modalities) form cross-subsidies. These payments are essentially unrelated to how much, where or when a driver chooses to drive and is a principle contributor to emission volumes and congestion on all road types.
Transparent, simple and frequent pricing signals would alter motorists perception of the social cost of driving at certain times and in certain places. The point made here is that the parking, insurance, and road-use payments we make, whether sufficient in aggregate or not, are remarkably inefficient economically. They provide no signal to motorists as to the social cost incurred by choosing when and where to drive. The act of driving a motorized vehicle, which has innumerable social, personal and commercial benefits is confounded by the choice and when and where to drive so that the social and personal benefits are partially and sometimes completely negated by an equivalent set of social, personal and commercial harms. If these three payment categories – parking, insurance and roads – were each fairly calculated relative to use, transparently visible to the motorist and with payment made effortlessly (debt and credit) and frequently (monthly), this would have the greatest single impact on decisions contributing to automotive usage demand.
There is now a single, unified, payment technology, based on in-car telematics, that measures exact use of parking, insurance and roads, scaled to vehicle type as well as to time and place of usage that permits governments and insurance companies to set and collect per-use charges in this fairer, more transparent way. This technology, standardized by ISO/CEN and under development in both Europe and North America, is a new generation of tolling technology that can be deployed wirelessly and requires no ground or curb-side infrastructure. Mobile spot-checking is still needed, but can be done far more cheaply than now because cost is shareable over all three sectors.
I opened this article pointing out that many governments are considering tolling all or most roads in their jurisdiction. These governments are correctly focused on the immediate culprit in transport demand problems: transport demand due to mispricing. Unfortunately, the effects of underpriced parking and mispriced insurance, while harder to fathom, are also not only underappreciated as causes of congestion, but form an opportunity for demand management via price correction far greater than does price correction to road pricing.
Gradually correcting all three payment regimes, even if expense-neutral in aggregate to each motorist, would generate powerful economic signals to that motorist. There are few things that garner attention like money.
Managing all three payments via a single system reduces the cost of that payment system. The cost of consumer-banking credit and debit systems is under 2% or 3% of money exchanged because of optimized system management, risk management, payment security, and payment volume. The current cost of road tolling payment management systems range from 20% to 40% of revenues and the cost of parking payment management systems can be twice that. Optimizing collection management, even ignoring the benefits of travel demand management, would conserve, in aggregate, many millions and for larger countries billions, of dollars per year for national, regional and municipal treasuries. Even leaving every motorist expense neutral would leave governments revenue positive. The extent of current system waste, redundancy and pricing misallocation is that high.
Where can we get started? Because motorists are more accustomed to parking payment than to road tolling, a program to redress urban parking underpayment over two or three years would meet with less motorist (voter!) resistance than a program of tolling existing roads or highways. If politicians were to apply market economics, this is an easier place to do so.
Driver behaviour is influenced by parking payment. Large payment differentials between on-street and off-street parking prices causes drivers to seek to minimize payment. Availability of free or under-priced street parking means avoidance of correctly-priced off-street parking. This alone generates a significant amount of inner-urban congestion as cars circle repeatedly to find cheap parking spots while passing up nearby garages that are priced higher. This also reduces incentive to invest in garage construction that would move these cars off street making room for pedestrians and bikes.
Market-priced management of urban street parking also reduces inter-urban and arterial congestion since it removes under-priced parking. Until now parking management systems have made this impossible because curb-side parking management is expensive, it can only be provided in area of greatest demand. This is a “long-tail” phenomena and works as follows.
Certain areas of a city experience high demand for parking. In those areas, the cost of parking management systems is less than the revenue that can be demanded for parking there. A municipal decision to charge for street parking is a local demand management decision predicated on charging slightly more that the amount needed to be able to pay the expenses of the requisite management system. A small surplus is taken to be sure the system expense does not become a financial burden to the city.
This is less of a profit-decision than could be taken by many municipal authorities. Rather many of these authorities are simply asking: “Can we afford to deploy a system to restrict parking to two-hours by charging a small amount that is sufficient to pay for meters so that we can in turn force compliance via issuing citations for meter violations?”
The answer for high-demand areas is: “yes!” Hence those areas get meters, but prices are set lower than market value because commercial interests argue that parking pricing hurts business. While this is demonstrably not always true (in fact the opposite is true in some circumstances), it can be true when free or cheaper parking is available in the next business district – i.e., when a motorist has an equally satisfying shopping, dining or entertainment choice away from priced parking.
Hence to make market-pricing work we need pricing management to be far more pervasive than now. Unfortunately, the per-spot expense of metering becomes prohibitive as soon as demand drops off. Hence while we can price modestly, or in rare circumstances, even sensibly in some high-demand urban areas, we cannot do so economically on the shoulders of those areas. This creates real or perceived disadvantages for commercial interests in competition with businesses outside of those shoulders, and suppresses parking payments that could be sensibly demanded, making it infeasible to deploy parking demand management systems outside relatively dense municipal areas, leaving these areas for free-parking, sign limited parking and tire-marking. Hence under-priced parking is baked in as a consequence of high management-system costs. Demand density dictates feasibility in the same way that density influences transit feasibility.If the per-spot expense-ratio for parking payment management were the same for every parking spot in a city or region, and was a small fraction of current costs, these disparities would disappear. New in-car telematics-based payment systems do this.
More important than the simple argument that lower system costs would make parking management more available to municipalities, this technology unlocks a vast pent-up demand for parking management, which has associated with it the revenue that would fund system costs for region-wide and country-wide road tolling.
The net, combined expense to a motorist for paying for parking, road-use and insurance, on a single system can be arranged to leave a motorist expense-neutral, while providing cost transparency, privacy and convenience.
The net savings in payment management systems for all three can leave an increased revenue margin to governments that can be used to neutralize the expense of new country-wide road tolling programs.
How can we get started? Begin by tolling for parking, under a regime wherein there is a gradual schedule of growth in number of spots-under-management. Use the technology advantages to simultaneously reduce manage expenses and to manage areas that were not feasible to manage before. This program and technology combination allows the same enforcement staff compliment to manage two or three times more spots. There is no need to reduce staff in circumstances where parking management will expand.
Permit the payment system operator who is servicing a voluntary population of motorists to sell additional value-added services such as PAYD insurance, parking services for private parking operators and parking finders and the like.
Arrange for this payment service provider to provide road-tolling billing services for those voluntary motorists who would be billed for variable (TDP) road-tolls while receiving credits for fuel taxes (or other taxes) as calculated by the same telematics system. Specifically, this payment services program would be set up so that sufficient revenues are generated from value-added services to permit the payment system operator to provide the road-use billing-feed free of charge to a tolling authority.
This system would first attract users for whom the value of the additional services and fairness of the balancing tax rebates would permit the shift to be perceived as valuable. As value added services increase in value, costs decline, and this approach becomes more acceptable, more motorists will join voluntarily.
The schedule to move the motorist population to this new system could be expected to take three to five years. As the service suite expands the service becomes increasingly attractive until such point that the government can announce a final rollout to all vehicles.
This approach leaves government in control of the switchover schedule, allows motorists to subscribe voluntarily, and allows system revenues to self-fund the system, meaning that government needs very little investment to get the system seeded and has the option to allocate zero operational expenses to the road-tolling portion of the system.
2009/12/07
What would Steve Jobs do?
If Steve Jobs decided to design a stick-on-your-windshield gizmo to handle payment of road tolls, what would he do so that people would line up outside the Apple store starting the night before to be the first to get one?
You’re probably thinking he wouldn’t be caught dead doing that, right?
But what if he knew there is talk of putting one on every car in the US after 2015? And every car in Europe in that same time-frame? And on every car in several Asian countries, as well? You know, for when we finally start doing something about congestion like we keep talking about, or start using alternative power vehicles and the gas tax dries up? Yeah. Then.
Well, first of all he would envision his customer looking like this fellow who just bought an iPhone. You know that, for sure.
Then he would figure, there is not a single person on the planet that wants to pay road tolls. Not even the people saying we need to start paying road tolls actually want to pay road tolls. He’d know that there will be competition and that his will have to do dozens of cool things that the competitors’ don’t.
So he would have his device let you park your car and forget getting out to pay a meter on the curb. And he’d find a way to end the need for parking tickets just like he ended the need for music CDs. He'd do that by providing for graduated pricing instead of a $30 ticket when you are 5 minutes late. And he would have it handle pay-as-you-go insurance to have those people who drive less than average save some money. He’d throw in an emergency call button, a carbon meter (or not).
He’d allow a credit exchange system so that your city could reward you with a couple of hours of free parking for leaving your car home once or twice a week. Or even provide you with some road use credits as a form of tax credit. He’d allow it to handle loyalty programs so if you kept using the same parking garage, you could get a few free hours once in a while. That would let you skip the monthly parking pass, because you’re thinking about teleworking more often anyway.
I doubt he’d stop there. He probably put in an wireless interface to your iPhone so you could download your parking and tolling bills and maybe sort them out for your expense reports. He’d add in a parking finder and reservation system – and maybe a way to guide you right to the spot using your iPhone. He would put in a program that optimizes your time or route of travel to minimize your cost of tolls.
I’m sure he’d have lots more ideas, as well. And if these saved you time and trouble and money – perhaps even as much money as you spend on tolls – then maybe you’d line up for it. I would.
Last week our meter was described in a few articles and on television. Several callers asked: “where can I get one?”
One person wrote: “I plug two dollars into a parking meter only to return to my car a few minutes late and I have a $20 or $30 dollar ticket waiting for me. I had $360 in such tickets last year! Sign me up. Not having to buy, maintain and collect and count coins from parking meters is money saved that can be put towards improving the transit system.”
You’re probably thinking he wouldn’t be caught dead doing that, right?
But what if he knew there is talk of putting one on every car in the US after 2015? And every car in Europe in that same time-frame? And on every car in several Asian countries, as well? You know, for when we finally start doing something about congestion like we keep talking about, or start using alternative power vehicles and the gas tax dries up? Yeah. Then.
Well, first of all he would envision his customer looking like this fellow who just bought an iPhone. You know that, for sure.
Then he would figure, there is not a single person on the planet that wants to pay road tolls. Not even the people saying we need to start paying road tolls actually want to pay road tolls. He’d know that there will be competition and that his will have to do dozens of cool things that the competitors’ don’t.So he would have his device let you park your car and forget getting out to pay a meter on the curb. And he’d find a way to end the need for parking tickets just like he ended the need for music CDs. He'd do that by providing for graduated pricing instead of a $30 ticket when you are 5 minutes late. And he would have it handle pay-as-you-go insurance to have those people who drive less than average save some money. He’d throw in an emergency call button, a carbon meter (or not).
He’d allow a credit exchange system so that your city could reward you with a couple of hours of free parking for leaving your car home once or twice a week. Or even provide you with some road use credits as a form of tax credit. He’d allow it to handle loyalty programs so if you kept using the same parking garage, you could get a few free hours once in a while. That would let you skip the monthly parking pass, because you’re thinking about teleworking more often anyway.
I doubt he’d stop there. He probably put in an wireless interface to your iPhone so you could download your parking and tolling bills and maybe sort them out for your expense reports. He’d add in a parking finder and reservation system – and maybe a way to guide you right to the spot using your iPhone. He would put in a program that optimizes your time or route of travel to minimize your cost of tolls.
I’m sure he’d have lots more ideas, as well. And if these saved you time and trouble and money – perhaps even as much money as you spend on tolls – then maybe you’d line up for it. I would.
Last week our meter was described in a few articles and on television. Several callers asked: “where can I get one?”
One person wrote: “I plug two dollars into a parking meter only to return to my car a few minutes late and I have a $20 or $30 dollar ticket waiting for me. I had $360 in such tickets last year! Sign me up. Not having to buy, maintain and collect and count coins from parking meters is money saved that can be put towards improving the transit system.”
Acceptability and other things about road pricing
The acceptability of road pricing is as much of a concern here in Prague, as it is back home in Toronto. Here is what a leading German authority has to say
If you are a transit advocate
If you are an advocate of market pricing for parking
Here is a possible reason to give away parking (temporarily, of course)
If you entertain objections about road tolling in your city, here are some thoughts to help you though that
If you are a transit advocate
If you are an advocate of market pricing for parking
Here is a possible reason to give away parking (temporarily, of course)
If you entertain objections about road tolling in your city, here are some thoughts to help you though that
2009/12/04
Insane Dane car give-away?
According to “The official Website of Denmark” the Danish government is intending to forgive the 180% registration tax, knock 40% off of the automotive insurance premium, and proposing free parking – in downtown Copenhagen, no less – for buyers of electric cars, according to a Streetsblog post by Charles Komanoff.
This is a stunning give-away. The 180% registration tax, alone is worth about $40,000. And after a few years free-parking would be worth even more.
Perhaps they can provide a driver, too.
This can’t be happening as alarmingly reported. The Danes are just not that stupid. This has to be time limited and meant to incentivize early adopters. Just like the US quadrabizzillion dollar CARS give-away was a temporary bail-out for Detroit's (now the American taxpayer's) internal combustion industry.
Somebody, please tell me I've got this part right.
This is a stunning give-away. The 180% registration tax, alone is worth about $40,000. And after a few years free-parking would be worth even more.
Perhaps they can provide a driver, too.
This can’t be happening as alarmingly reported. The Danes are just not that stupid. This has to be time limited and meant to incentivize early adopters. Just like the US quadrabizzillion dollar CARS give-away was a temporary bail-out for Detroit's (now the American taxpayer's) internal combustion industry.
Somebody, please tell me I've got this part right.
~~~~
Looking a bit further, according to this article, it appears that electric cars have been registration tax-free in Denmark for 25 years. And according to the same article, in spite of this $40,000 tax-relief there are only 500 electric cars registered in Denmark. Out of 2.7M vehicles, that is 0.02% of the fleet, I suspect similar to the stats in most western countries. The unsurprising reason given is that consumers experience “…a psychological barrier … when their car is dependent on a battery station”. Makes sense.
But the government and some partners, notably Shai Agassi’s “Better Place” are outfitting the country with charging and battery-swap stations, at $100M. Hence, the tax-parking-insurance breaks are only half of the picture.
So, given that large investment, the Danes need a rapid uptake of the new cars and the new infrastructure. They need people to switch from ic-cars to e-cars, NOT from transit or bikes to e-cars.
I think they need to incentivize people to switch. But better if they mimicked the unfortunate US cash for clunkers program with an e-car for ic-car swap, but leave the parking and insurance bits out of the deal. If they want a rapid rise to 1% of the fleet, they could do this for 27,000 swaps at a cost (ignoring the inferred tax loss) of some 800M, or less if they took some money in the trade. If they did the swap with only vehicles of a certain size or age, they could optimize the impact.
I venture to guess that with the worst 1% of the fleet switched AND with reports of clear workability, fuel-tax savings, few operational problems, and no safety-of-life mishaps because of dead batteries, a 30% switch would follow in the next 5-7 years, without the extreme incentives.
Bribing people to switch is fine – but the parking thing? – that really has to be temporary. There is no possible logic to make it permanent.
The problem with us criticizing a green idea (e-car-bribery) as a congestion inducer (free-parking), without knowing and weighing the full extent of the free-parking program is to lend credence to climategate by quarreling amongst ourselves.
2009/11/29
How Skymeter got started
I am often asked where the idea for Skymeter came from.
The idea occurred first in the spring of 2002. I was speeding mindlessly and got a ticket. That how I get all speeding tickets since I turned 35. I imagined a device that was loaded with speeds by road segment that bleeped when I was going over by an enforceable margin. A private, automatic back-seat driver that would work even when my wife was not with me. Within 2 weeks, I had concluded that the number of people who speed mindlessly and would be interested to purchase this device would be minuscule.
By then I had received a parking ticket on Queen Street East after leaving my lunch guest at a restaurant to feed my meter. I was maybe a minute late (the clock on the meter was fast). I was soon hooked on the idea of a parking meter that completely wiped out current parking payment management practices, including tickets. This was simply for convenience.
This parking ticket deeply set the idea that the way governments manage payment services for parking was wasteful and needlessly adversarial. It would take me another two years to find out how really abysmal the whole of parking management was - especially in North America.
While working with a colleague in the fall of 2002 to understand how well a modified (moving average) Garmin positioning device with added store and forward might act as a parking meter, he commented: "why not use this for road pricing?" I was frankly surprised at the idea. He pointed out that Europeans were poised to do this, and when I looked into it that evening, found that the London Congestion Charge was due to start early in 2003 by deploying a hideous complex and expensive system, that would have me leave Toronto were it to be deployed here. I immediately started to design a system that would do both parking and road pricing. I renamed my IT consulting company to Applied Location Corporation and called my product Skymeter.
In October of 2003, I met the first of many transportation economists I would befriend. He taught me two things: pay-as-you-drive insurance was a third and critical vehicular payment service and road pricing was essentially agreed among transport economists and likely inevitable. His advice was to concentrate on the technological enablers and not to worry about explaining the necessity of road pricing.
In 2004, I applied for a patent for a three-in-one payment services system for road-pricing, parking-payment and pay-as-you-drive insurance. Skymeter Corporation was formed in late 2006 based on all of the R+D done by Applied Location to that point.
The idea occurred first in the spring of 2002. I was speeding mindlessly and got a ticket. That how I get all speeding tickets since I turned 35. I imagined a device that was loaded with speeds by road segment that bleeped when I was going over by an enforceable margin. A private, automatic back-seat driver that would work even when my wife was not with me. Within 2 weeks, I had concluded that the number of people who speed mindlessly and would be interested to purchase this device would be minuscule.
By then I had received a parking ticket on Queen Street East after leaving my lunch guest at a restaurant to feed my meter. I was maybe a minute late (the clock on the meter was fast). I was soon hooked on the idea of a parking meter that completely wiped out current parking payment management practices, including tickets. This was simply for convenience.
This parking ticket deeply set the idea that the way governments manage payment services for parking was wasteful and needlessly adversarial. It would take me another two years to find out how really abysmal the whole of parking management was - especially in North America.
While working with a colleague in the fall of 2002 to understand how well a modified (moving average) Garmin positioning device with added store and forward might act as a parking meter, he commented: "why not use this for road pricing?" I was frankly surprised at the idea. He pointed out that Europeans were poised to do this, and when I looked into it that evening, found that the London Congestion Charge was due to start early in 2003 by deploying a hideous complex and expensive system, that would have me leave Toronto were it to be deployed here. I immediately started to design a system that would do both parking and road pricing. I renamed my IT consulting company to Applied Location Corporation and called my product Skymeter.
In October of 2003, I met the first of many transportation economists I would befriend. He taught me two things: pay-as-you-drive insurance was a third and critical vehicular payment service and road pricing was essentially agreed among transport economists and likely inevitable. His advice was to concentrate on the technological enablers and not to worry about explaining the necessity of road pricing.
In 2004, I applied for a patent for a three-in-one payment services system for road-pricing, parking-payment and pay-as-you-drive insurance. Skymeter Corporation was formed in late 2006 based on all of the R+D done by Applied Location to that point.
2009/11/24
Blogs on the Dutch decision to proceed
Robin Chase: Holland first city with distance tax (its a charge, not a tax!)
Clean Break: Dutch pursue idea of cross-country road pricing
Greg Mankiw: Netherlands joins the Pigou Club
Worldchanging: Netherlands Plans Massive Road-Pricing Scheme
Stephen Rees: The Dutch Introduce Road Pricing
Centurean2: Oppression Watch: Road Pricing In The Netherlands
Financial Times: Dutch propose full-scale road pricing system
AutoCar: Holland launches road-charging
When you read a lot of articles, reports and blogs and browse the comments to many of these, you can sort all of them into one of four intellectual camps:
Conspiracy (Governments are greedy or incompetent)
Status Quo (Just increase the gas tax!)
Panic (Charge vehicle mile traveled ASAP; tends to happen in US mostly)
Market (Charge distance by time and place of consumption)
Clean Break: Dutch pursue idea of cross-country road pricing
Greg Mankiw: Netherlands joins the Pigou Club
Worldchanging: Netherlands Plans Massive Road-Pricing Scheme
Stephen Rees: The Dutch Introduce Road Pricing
Centurean2: Oppression Watch: Road Pricing In The Netherlands
Financial Times: Dutch propose full-scale road pricing system
This one ended on an odd note: "Getting the technology right could prove challenging. Germany’s lorry-charging scheme was delayed as the satellite system that it chose became confused by tall buildings."even a car-review magazine: Road charging going Dutch
That system used technology from well over five years ago and is no longer a problem. The technology to be used in Holland will be at least a two full generations ahead of that earlier technology.
AutoCar: Holland launches road-charging
One of the comments on this last one is interesting:and according to the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management --- GNSS Road Pricing will be used.
"This kinda worries me because if it does actually work the British government would introduce it in our country, only to make a complete hash of it."
This tells me there is at least one Brit who thinks it might work, but assumes his government can't figure it out. I assumed that no one made that kind of subtle distinction in Britain anymore, and that like Peter Roberts "no" has no flavors.
<<< >>>
When you read a lot of articles, reports and blogs and browse the comments to many of these, you can sort all of them into one of four intellectual camps:
Conspiracy (Governments are greedy or incompetent)
Status Quo (Just increase the gas tax!)
Panic (Charge vehicle mile traveled ASAP; tends to happen in US mostly)
Market (Charge distance by time and place of consumption)
2009/11/23
Will Green Innovations in Canada benefit Canadian Investors?
Skymeter has been named among Corporate Knights' Next 10 Emerging Leaders list for 2009. This is a ‘cleantech’ list.
According Alia McMullen of the National Post ("Startups to Watch", Financial Post 2009.11.23), Skymeter’s CEO, Kamal Hassan is looking to raise money offshore.
On the same page of the same issue of the Financial Post, Rick Spence opens his article (“VCs are looking for great ideas”), with “Equity financing has never been easy to source in Canada. But now it's getting worse.”
Make sense to you?
According Alia McMullen of the National Post ("Startups to Watch", Financial Post 2009.11.23), Skymeter’s CEO, Kamal Hassan is looking to raise money offshore.
On the same page of the same issue of the Financial Post, Rick Spence opens his article (“VCs are looking for great ideas”), with “Equity financing has never been easy to source in Canada. But now it's getting worse.”
Make sense to you?
2009/11/21
Privacy will dictate the architecture of GNSS road-use metering systems
One of the protests most frequently offered for not wanting to use positioning satellites to toll our roads is the assumption that cars will be tracked and the perception of considerable loss of privacy that would entail. Any journalist will tell you this. While it is technically possible to build such a repugnant system, few would tolerate it.
It can be argued that it is neither useful nor sensible to build such systems that way. But there are two perfect reasons this will not happen. First, in most countries, such a system would be so unacceptable to drivers that it would be boycotted or vandalized to an extent that it would become unreliable and perhaps even inoperable as a financial system. Second, most of these same countries are in the process of adopting policies that will not permit tracking of private vehicles, using road pricing data for any purpose other than intended, or retaining such data once payment is settled, which in the case of a prepaid account would be instantaneous.
The International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications (IWGDPT) has been addressing this for some time. Founded in 1983 in the framework of the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, the IWGDPT formulates recommendations to improve the protection of privacy in telecommunications. The Sofia Memorandum, issued at the 45th meeting of the WG in March 2009 directs its guidance toward road pricing.
The WG made the following
Privacy Commissioners in several countries have indicated that they will promote these recommendations. Natasa Pirc Musar, the Slovene Information Commissioner, issued a similar opinion, prior to the IWGDPT guidance, stressing that data can only be used for the purposes stated and must be managed according to the criticality of the need (“principle of proportionality”). Her opinion: Personal data (including location data) is to remain exclusively under the surveillance of the user.
Marc also pointed out that “Peter Hustinx, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), issued his opinion on the European Commission's proposed plan to accelerate and coordinate the deployment of ITS in road transportation in Europe based on guidance of the Sofia Memorandum.”
In paragraph 45 under Safeguards for the use of location tools for the provision of ITS location-based services, The EDPS states:
All of this means that thin-class telematics (that forward location information to a data centre for processing) for road-user charging will likely have little market excepting possibly for commercial vehicles. The task, now, for road-use telematics designers is to make fat devices (that determine a bill on-board) cheaper.
It can be argued that it is neither useful nor sensible to build such systems that way. But there are two perfect reasons this will not happen. First, in most countries, such a system would be so unacceptable to drivers that it would be boycotted or vandalized to an extent that it would become unreliable and perhaps even inoperable as a financial system. Second, most of these same countries are in the process of adopting policies that will not permit tracking of private vehicles, using road pricing data for any purpose other than intended, or retaining such data once payment is settled, which in the case of a prepaid account would be instantaneous.
The International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications (IWGDPT) has been addressing this for some time. Founded in 1983 in the framework of the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, the IWGDPT formulates recommendations to improve the protection of privacy in telecommunications. The Sofia Memorandum, issued at the 45th meeting of the WG in March 2009 directs its guidance toward road pricing.
The WG made the following
"recommendations designed to protect the privacy of drivers and owners of vehicles:Miroslav Marc, member of ISO/CEN standardization committees dealing with road use charging, explains: “IWGDPT opinions are not legally binding nor is that intended. They are formal recommendations. The Sofia Memorandum, however, is not just a European document, but an international one, since IWGDPT members come from around the world. The weight of these recommendations is reflected in the respect for the institutions that adopted them.”
- The anonymity of the driver can and should be preserved by using the so-called smart client or anonymous proxy approaches that keep personal data of the drivers under their sole control and do not require off-board location record-keeping.
- Road pricing systems can and should be designed so that the detailed trip data are fully and permanently deleted from the system after the charges have been settled in order to prevent the creation of movement profiles or the potential for function-creep.
- Processing of personal data for other purposes (e.g. pay-as you drive insurance or behavioral-based marketing), should only be possible with clear and unambiguous consent from the individual.
- In terms of enforcement, the system should not ascertain the identity of the driver or owner of a vehicle unless there is evidence that the driver has committed something which is defined as a violation of the road pricing system."
Privacy Commissioners in several countries have indicated that they will promote these recommendations. Natasa Pirc Musar, the Slovene Information Commissioner, issued a similar opinion, prior to the IWGDPT guidance, stressing that data can only be used for the purposes stated and must be managed according to the criticality of the need (“principle of proportionality”). Her opinion: Personal data (including location data) is to remain exclusively under the surveillance of the user.
Marc also pointed out that “Peter Hustinx, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), issued his opinion on the European Commission's proposed plan to accelerate and coordinate the deployment of ITS in road transportation in Europe based on guidance of the Sofia Memorandum.”
In paragraph 45 under Safeguards for the use of location tools for the provision of ITS location-based services, The EDPS states:
"The use of location technologies is particularly intrusive from a privacy viewpoint… As was stressed by the Article 29 Working Party, the processing of location data is a particularly sensitive matter involving the key issue of the freedom to move anonymously, and which requires the implementation of specific safeguards in order to prevent surveillance of individuals and misuse of the data."It is doubtful that any country will permit GNSS telematics that do not provide extreme privacy protection, even anonymity – i.e., likely disallowing methods to permit location data to leave the vehicle without driver/owner control. Brazil’s Federal Government (Seventh Circuit Federal CIVIL ACTION PUBLIC Autos) recently made it illegal to mandate tracking-enabled telematics.
All of this means that thin-class telematics (that forward location information to a data centre for processing) for road-user charging will likely have little market excepting possibly for commercial vehicles. The task, now, for road-use telematics designers is to make fat devices (that determine a bill on-board) cheaper.
2009/11/20
Foot in mouth is not DesRosiers’
In a Globe article 2009.11.17, Jennifer Pritchett offered a neutral-to-positive story on the technology to address the pending shift from fuel taxes to road-use-charges. The 20 comments were 60% pro road-pricing, 40% against.
Analyst Dennis DesRosiers of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants Inc. offered what other readers thought was a negative, almost calloused comment. It was so badly received that he managed to have it removed, leaving only copies in other’s comments.
DesRosiers is on to something. He's uncovered the REAL problem. It is not “privacy”. It is not “equity for the poor”. It is not “because we already pay fuel tax”. It is not even that about a third of readers don’t understand market economics, which DesRosiers clearly does. The problem DesRosiers points to is that the government is tripping over itself. The Ministry of Energy is promising that Ontario Power Generation will be ready with the electricity for the presumably-pending electric vehicle. The Ministry of Industry is promising (and investing) in saving automotive jobs. The Ministry of Revenue refuses to raise gas tax. The Ministry of Transportation is refusing to toll roads, while insisting that Metrolinx figure out the missing $38B to fix our egregious transportation (cars, transit and bikes) system.
Fleet electrification plus government money artificially pumping out more and more cars will accelerate the pressure on our roads -- both lack of funding due to the withering gas-tax and congestion as a consequence of the government's DesRosierian Economics. And on my car radio this morning, as I waited for three light changes to get through one intersection, I listened to a report that Canada has its greatest debt ever and another story about global warming.
Who are the biggest losers in all this? You are. You are stuck in filth and traffic whether on bus, bike or car because government Ministries are uncoordinated and isolated from each other, each with their own bacon to save. And which Ministry loses for lack of coordination? They all do.
If you want to use your car ten years from now, you should ask for road pricing to reduce congestion. If you want to use transit 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing to double your service. If you want to use a bike 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing to open up room for bikeways. If you want to telework 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing so your employer can better justify your not spending time and money to drive to the office (your employer respects your money, but discounts your time). If you want a greener city 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing that varies by engine type.
And, if you really hate government so much, you should ask for road pricing, and then never drive again. If you really think it is all a big tax grab, why not just starve them out?
Analyst Dennis DesRosiers of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants Inc. offered what other readers thought was a negative, almost calloused comment. It was so badly received that he managed to have it removed, leaving only copies in other’s comments.
"These kinds of [road tolling] technologies make [transportation] more efficient, I don't deny that, but if governments collectively want to protect the 900,000 to one million jobs in the automotive industry, they also have to accept that we need more vehicles, not less ... I'm against road pricing… We need consumers to drive more, not less."I read his full original, it was brutally honest. His comment was lambasted by a couple of others. But DesRosiers is in every way correct. He has a right to an opinion that it should not be done (in fact he agrees it would be effective). His critical point, however, was “if governments collectively want to protect the 900,000 to one million jobs in the automotive industry…”
DesRosiers is on to something. He's uncovered the REAL problem. It is not “privacy”. It is not “equity for the poor”. It is not “because we already pay fuel tax”. It is not even that about a third of readers don’t understand market economics, which DesRosiers clearly does. The problem DesRosiers points to is that the government is tripping over itself. The Ministry of Energy is promising that Ontario Power Generation will be ready with the electricity for the presumably-pending electric vehicle. The Ministry of Industry is promising (and investing) in saving automotive jobs. The Ministry of Revenue refuses to raise gas tax. The Ministry of Transportation is refusing to toll roads, while insisting that Metrolinx figure out the missing $38B to fix our egregious transportation (cars, transit and bikes) system.
Fleet electrification plus government money artificially pumping out more and more cars will accelerate the pressure on our roads -- both lack of funding due to the withering gas-tax and congestion as a consequence of the government's DesRosierian Economics. And on my car radio this morning, as I waited for three light changes to get through one intersection, I listened to a report that Canada has its greatest debt ever and another story about global warming.
Who are the biggest losers in all this? You are. You are stuck in filth and traffic whether on bus, bike or car because government Ministries are uncoordinated and isolated from each other, each with their own bacon to save. And which Ministry loses for lack of coordination? They all do.
If you want to use your car ten years from now, you should ask for road pricing to reduce congestion. If you want to use transit 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing to double your service. If you want to use a bike 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing to open up room for bikeways. If you want to telework 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing so your employer can better justify your not spending time and money to drive to the office (your employer respects your money, but discounts your time). If you want a greener city 10 years from now you should ask for road pricing that varies by engine type.
And, if you really hate government so much, you should ask for road pricing, and then never drive again. If you really think it is all a big tax grab, why not just starve them out?
2009/11/18
Accessibility vs mobility
Sometimes a short film is better that a blog. Jane Jacobs talked about removing road space making traffic disappear back in the 60s. That's 50 years ago.
2009/11/17
The anthropologist and the road pricer
At a recent road-pricing conference here in Toronto, after hearing some eight presentations about congestion-pricing and road-pricing, a woman stood up to express a concern that we were overly focused on only one small issue. That we ought to look at broader issues of planning and sprawl - the really big contextual issues that threaten us.
I followed her comment by asserting that road pricing was in fact the keystone to most of these things and that solving this will open up enormous possibilities throughout her list of broader concerns. In fact, I assert that many of these things she was concerned with are symptoms of the wrong economic model for paying for roads.
I spoke with her afterward - Professor Judith Nagata, with the Anthropology Department at York University. She introduced me to David Owen's book, Green Metropolis. It looks promising.
Changing the we pay for using cars will be one of the most important shifts of the 21st century. At least as important as Henry Ford's assembly line. It has engineering, transportation, urban planning, economic, public health, livability, safety, social equity, sociological, employment, commercial, transit, military, geo-political, climate change, and many other implications. It is not surprising that an anthropologist would take an interest.
I followed her comment by asserting that road pricing was in fact the keystone to most of these things and that solving this will open up enormous possibilities throughout her list of broader concerns. In fact, I assert that many of these things she was concerned with are symptoms of the wrong economic model for paying for roads.
I spoke with her afterward - Professor Judith Nagata, with the Anthropology Department at York University. She introduced me to David Owen's book, Green Metropolis. It looks promising.
Changing the we pay for using cars will be one of the most important shifts of the 21st century. At least as important as Henry Ford's assembly line. It has engineering, transportation, urban planning, economic, public health, livability, safety, social equity, sociological, employment, commercial, transit, military, geo-political, climate change, and many other implications. It is not surprising that an anthropologist would take an interest.
More Big Brother Errata
This morning, the Globe and Mail printed a story about Skymeter that left out a critical detail.
Road-use metering technology (such as Skymeter's) is constrained to be "Location Anonymous", by compliance with the Sofia Memorandum from the International Working Group for Data Protection in Telecommunications (IWGDPT). Location data are not permitted to exit the vehicle. All charges owed are calculated on-board and only the billing data may be forwarded from the device. It is in fact more private than E-ZPass or 407 transponders and cameras. We are forced by law to NOT provide or permit a method to "see" where a vehicle is. To do this reliably while blocking fraud and tampering forms the bulk of our innovation over the past seven years. Unfortunately, this fact is never passed on by journalists. We are not sure why. Perhaps because such privacy protection is good news. There is no Big Brother. There is only paying for what you use.
Road-use metering technology (such as Skymeter's) is constrained to be "Location Anonymous", by compliance with the Sofia Memorandum from the International Working Group for Data Protection in Telecommunications (IWGDPT). Location data are not permitted to exit the vehicle. All charges owed are calculated on-board and only the billing data may be forwarded from the device. It is in fact more private than E-ZPass or 407 transponders and cameras. We are forced by law to NOT provide or permit a method to "see" where a vehicle is. To do this reliably while blocking fraud and tampering forms the bulk of our innovation over the past seven years. Unfortunately, this fact is never passed on by journalists. We are not sure why. Perhaps because such privacy protection is good news. There is no Big Brother. There is only paying for what you use.
OECD is Not New to Road Pricing
The recent OECD report about Toronto, that only a few of us can read since it is unavailable to non-accredited journalists until 2010, has generated a mini-furor among Toronto's free-road driverazzi, who think their gas-tax pays for Toronto's potholes (I mean roads) and are all sure the gummint will take their money but not fix anything.
To the OECD's credit, they defended Road Pricing awhile back in January 2002.
To the OECD's credit, they defended Road Pricing awhile back in January 2002.
Contrary to some sceptical voices in the car lobby, road pricing is not an attack on car use, but rather a way of enhancing it. If there is an enemy of the car industry, it is inefficient congestion.
2009/11/10
Why does the OECD see what we resist?
2009.11.10 Today, the Globe’s Brian Fenlon and Post’s Natalie Alcoba reports some sharp criticism for Toronto from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (from a report commissioned by the City). Bravo! Someone to tell us like it is!
But why do we need to pay an external body to tell us we have “one of the highest rates of car use among cities in the organization's 30 member countries” and that “the Toronto region should consider measures such as toll lanes, local fuel and parking taxes, and a Singapore-style congestion charge in which roads in the city centre and major routes such as the 400-series highways would be subject to fees that vary according to peak hours”? We know this, don’t we? Or perhaps like a case of a person in the next cubicle with a body odor problem, we need someone else to deliver the message.
The Globe article reports one of the OECD’s findings as “our region lags on innovation indicators such as patents, citations, high-tech employment and entrepreneurship… Governments should invest in more initiatives like Toronto's MaRS Discovery District.”
Now that cuts a bit close. A firm called Skymeter is in MaRS. They have developed several patents there. In fact those patents permit Ontario to solve the aforementioned “congestion charge” that would allow road-use fees to vary according to peak hours and well as cleaning up our parking problem. They have entrepreneurs and hire high-tech staff. I am one of them. And some 15 countries and cities are studying this Canadian-innovated and Canadian-made technology. Only innovations like Skymeter’s can prove the OECD wrong.
A CBC report.
And another.
OCED review.
Another OECD review.
But why do we need to pay an external body to tell us we have “one of the highest rates of car use among cities in the organization's 30 member countries” and that “the Toronto region should consider measures such as toll lanes, local fuel and parking taxes, and a Singapore-style congestion charge in which roads in the city centre and major routes such as the 400-series highways would be subject to fees that vary according to peak hours”? We know this, don’t we? Or perhaps like a case of a person in the next cubicle with a body odor problem, we need someone else to deliver the message.
The Globe article reports one of the OECD’s findings as “our region lags on innovation indicators such as patents, citations, high-tech employment and entrepreneurship… Governments should invest in more initiatives like Toronto's MaRS Discovery District.”
Now that cuts a bit close. A firm called Skymeter is in MaRS. They have developed several patents there. In fact those patents permit Ontario to solve the aforementioned “congestion charge” that would allow road-use fees to vary according to peak hours and well as cleaning up our parking problem. They have entrepreneurs and hire high-tech staff. I am one of them. And some 15 countries and cities are studying this Canadian-innovated and Canadian-made technology. Only innovations like Skymeter’s can prove the OECD wrong.
A CBC report.
And another.
OCED review.
Another OECD review.
2009/11/08
They’re not getting it
Earlier in November 2009, I was a guest on a talk-TV show, Goldhawk Live (Rogers). The host Dale Goldhawk, posed the question: “Road tolls: are you for or against?”
There were two live guests, myself, an advocate of pricing all road-use at the marginal rate needed to manage congestion, and Jim Kenzie, a respected and awarded automotive journalist and car racer. Mr Kenzie is not an advocate of road tolling.
Mr Goldhawk also pre-arranged two phone in-guests: Marty Collier a local transport consultant and long-time road pricing advocate who runs an annual conference here in Toronto, and Economics Professor Harry Kitchen, author of "Financing Public Transit and Transportation in the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton: Future Initiatives," (2008).
Clearly, the guest deck was stacked three to one against Mr Kenzie.
When asked to explain the new-generation tolling technology, I briefly explained that it metered all road use and parking use, compared that use to an internal database of charging information for the purpose of road tolling, parking payment and pay-as-you-go insurance. I explained that location information was not permitted to leave the vehicle and that the device I had brought to the show shielded privacy to conform with international data privacy standards, which demand that location data not leave the vehicle.
Mr Kenzie’s position was the usual “we already pay way too many taxes, this is just more government intrusion that is no different than ‘big brother’ ”. He also pointed out that automotive emissions were so little that they should not be considered further in the global warming issue. Then he said that gas tax should absolutely be raised, contradicting his comment re “way too many taxes” only a minute before.
My position was that all roads should be tolled at a few cents per kilometer to replace fuel tax and to manage congestion and emissions. That long trips should pay more than short trips, and that peak-hour trips would cost more than non-peak-hour trips. I also criticized tolling “just the Don Valley and the Gardiner” as that forced people commuting from East and North East to pay (for example) $8 subsidizing those using the 401 and 427 (for free) coming from the North West. (I did not have a chance to describe the mess this would make of traffic on parallel streets and arteries.)
Mr Collier’s position was that road tolling (as well as pay-as-you-go insurance) was important for people to become conscious of the costs of their travel choices, that pay-as-you-go transportation sent ‘pricing signals’ to commuters, some of whom would make better choices thereby benefiting everyone, including those who continued driving on now-less-congested roads. (While this is an accurate description of the use of tax structures to influence choice – another example is tobacco taxes – this seemed to go over the head of at least one caller who resorted to describing Mr Collier as a “ding-dong”.)
Prof. Kitchen pointed out that he has been a long-time advocate of road pricing and that road tolls are increasingly critical to transportation funding. He says this with some authority, since he is one of a handful of respected Canadian academics that have written extensively on the subject.
By my recollection, the callers were split about 50/50, and a concurrent web-poll was 64% pro road-tolling, a surprising result since prior to a road pricing deployment, a population is usually about 30-40% pro-pricing.
What did you say?
Several of the callers agreed with Kenzie by repeating the usual: “I don't like tolling – just raise the gas-tax”. About this, I make two observations. First, more and more drivers are recognizing that there is a funding problem. A minority blames it on political conspirators who misspend; others, aware that the gas tax has not been raised in years, can understand why the problem is real.
Second, few people are able to grasp two key issues: (a) the fuel tax does not address congestion (Collier’s “pricing signals”) and (b) that increasing engine efficiency robs the tax base – i.e., green driving hurts road funding. The perfect illustration was a caller about ¾ through the show, who was explaining why raising the gas tax was the answer. I interrupting and said: “yes, but I have an all-electric car. How long are you willing to subsidize me?” He paused and said: “Oh, well, that's a different matter. Maybe your system will be needed for that.”
I was taken off-guard by Kenzie’s response to that: “The problem is all these efficiency standards. The government should force all vehicles to get 10 miles to the gallon or less”. I hesitated to point out that such a step would multiply fuel costs per kilometer by about 250% whereas the road tolls that Collier, Kitchen, and I are describing would cause an effective per kilometer increase of 20-30%. I suspect that Kenzie did not mean what he said, knowing it was absurd. Rather I sensed that he realized that the diversification of power plants and the specter of low-cost, self-generated electricity mooted all his arguments, and that he probably spoke more in anger than in jest.
I do not think that most people have the time or patience for arguments about pricing signals and using taxes to flatten peak-hour travel. But I do think drivers of internal combustion engines will start to ask for a new, altered or complementary tax-structure for greener vehicles as soon as fleet electrification reaches, say, 5 or 6%. Crediting politicians with greater than average intelligence, I think they will see the problem at 3 or 4%.
Why? Because a 3% drop in vehicle miles travel bankrupted the Highway Trust Fund in the US during the recent recession, and has sent the US into a flurry of interest in road-tolling to close this funding gap.
There were two live guests, myself, an advocate of pricing all road-use at the marginal rate needed to manage congestion, and Jim Kenzie, a respected and awarded automotive journalist and car racer. Mr Kenzie is not an advocate of road tolling.
Mr Goldhawk also pre-arranged two phone in-guests: Marty Collier a local transport consultant and long-time road pricing advocate who runs an annual conference here in Toronto, and Economics Professor Harry Kitchen, author of "Financing Public Transit and Transportation in the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton: Future Initiatives," (2008).
Clearly, the guest deck was stacked three to one against Mr Kenzie.
When asked to explain the new-generation tolling technology, I briefly explained that it metered all road use and parking use, compared that use to an internal database of charging information for the purpose of road tolling, parking payment and pay-as-you-go insurance. I explained that location information was not permitted to leave the vehicle and that the device I had brought to the show shielded privacy to conform with international data privacy standards, which demand that location data not leave the vehicle.
Mr Kenzie’s position was the usual “we already pay way too many taxes, this is just more government intrusion that is no different than ‘big brother’ ”. He also pointed out that automotive emissions were so little that they should not be considered further in the global warming issue. Then he said that gas tax should absolutely be raised, contradicting his comment re “way too many taxes” only a minute before.
My position was that all roads should be tolled at a few cents per kilometer to replace fuel tax and to manage congestion and emissions. That long trips should pay more than short trips, and that peak-hour trips would cost more than non-peak-hour trips. I also criticized tolling “just the Don Valley and the Gardiner” as that forced people commuting from East and North East to pay (for example) $8 subsidizing those using the 401 and 427 (for free) coming from the North West. (I did not have a chance to describe the mess this would make of traffic on parallel streets and arteries.)
Mr Collier’s position was that road tolling (as well as pay-as-you-go insurance) was important for people to become conscious of the costs of their travel choices, that pay-as-you-go transportation sent ‘pricing signals’ to commuters, some of whom would make better choices thereby benefiting everyone, including those who continued driving on now-less-congested roads. (While this is an accurate description of the use of tax structures to influence choice – another example is tobacco taxes – this seemed to go over the head of at least one caller who resorted to describing Mr Collier as a “ding-dong”.)
Prof. Kitchen pointed out that he has been a long-time advocate of road pricing and that road tolls are increasingly critical to transportation funding. He says this with some authority, since he is one of a handful of respected Canadian academics that have written extensively on the subject.
By my recollection, the callers were split about 50/50, and a concurrent web-poll was 64% pro road-tolling, a surprising result since prior to a road pricing deployment, a population is usually about 30-40% pro-pricing.
What did you say?
Several of the callers agreed with Kenzie by repeating the usual: “I don't like tolling – just raise the gas-tax”. About this, I make two observations. First, more and more drivers are recognizing that there is a funding problem. A minority blames it on political conspirators who misspend; others, aware that the gas tax has not been raised in years, can understand why the problem is real.
Second, few people are able to grasp two key issues: (a) the fuel tax does not address congestion (Collier’s “pricing signals”) and (b) that increasing engine efficiency robs the tax base – i.e., green driving hurts road funding. The perfect illustration was a caller about ¾ through the show, who was explaining why raising the gas tax was the answer. I interrupting and said: “yes, but I have an all-electric car. How long are you willing to subsidize me?” He paused and said: “Oh, well, that's a different matter. Maybe your system will be needed for that.”
I was taken off-guard by Kenzie’s response to that: “The problem is all these efficiency standards. The government should force all vehicles to get 10 miles to the gallon or less”. I hesitated to point out that such a step would multiply fuel costs per kilometer by about 250% whereas the road tolls that Collier, Kitchen, and I are describing would cause an effective per kilometer increase of 20-30%. I suspect that Kenzie did not mean what he said, knowing it was absurd. Rather I sensed that he realized that the diversification of power plants and the specter of low-cost, self-generated electricity mooted all his arguments, and that he probably spoke more in anger than in jest.
I do not think that most people have the time or patience for arguments about pricing signals and using taxes to flatten peak-hour travel. But I do think drivers of internal combustion engines will start to ask for a new, altered or complementary tax-structure for greener vehicles as soon as fleet electrification reaches, say, 5 or 6%. Crediting politicians with greater than average intelligence, I think they will see the problem at 3 or 4%.
Why? Because a 3% drop in vehicle miles travel bankrupted the Highway Trust Fund in the US during the recent recession, and has sent the US into a flurry of interest in road-tolling to close this funding gap.
2009/10/19
Funding: Get Serious About Toronto Cycling, Part II
A couple days ago, in Part I, I described a way to create space for wider, safer, separated, arterial bike lanes by offering managed parking within a block to replace street parking displaced by those lanes. While no new parking spaces are needed, this still requires a modest amount of funding.
The same in-car equipment needed to manage all that extra parking is also able to selectively toll a single street. In Toronto, a small number of arterials such as Bathurst, Gerrard, St.Clair or Vic Park (better ones would be chosen by traffic planners), could be tolled during peak hours (drivers can avoid the toll by avoiding those few streets during those hours – so the system is voluntary, as is the 407). Streets tolled in this way would have dramatically less automotive traffic during peak hours (perhaps 80% less) and can then be used for bike lanes and RT (rapid transit). Those drivers wishing to take advantage of these routes to save peak-hour travel time might pay, say, 12 to 15 cents/km (i.e., less than the 407 fee of 18 cents or so). The revenue from these drivers would help fund the alterations needed to accommodate the bike lanes.
The beneficiaries of such a scheme would be:
How it works
A small telematics ‘black box’ is mounted on the windshield (just like a 407 ‘tolltag’). It gathers position information which it then turns into a toll amount (no position information leaves the ‘front-end’ system. When the vehicle is parked, the black box determines if any toll is owed for the prior journey (most roads are not payable), if it is payable a notice goes to a billing center saying how much is owed and to whom. An account (which may be “pre-paid/anonymous”) is then debited or a private, non-anonymous, account is charged. This is done without the ‘gantries’ that hover over the 407, because the positioning is done by GPS and the communication by build-in cellular. The black-box software that is used to be certain a car was on the road being charged for is sophisticated and involves a highly reliable form of GPS called financial-grade GPS for these kinds of applications. It is designed to be impossible to overcharge. The system is also designed so that it cannot be tracked (like a having a Garmin NUVI or a Tom Tom that only the driver can see. So security (anti-theft) features are not available on this system.
When the car leaves its parking spot, a similar determination is made to determine the parking fee for that spot, as described in Part I. Several other services, such as pay-as-you-drive insurance, loyalty rewards for parking, modality rewards for not driving during peak hours, and the like will soon be available.
The same in-car equipment needed to manage all that extra parking is also able to selectively toll a single street. In Toronto, a small number of arterials such as Bathurst, Gerrard, St.Clair or Vic Park (better ones would be chosen by traffic planners), could be tolled during peak hours (drivers can avoid the toll by avoiding those few streets during those hours – so the system is voluntary, as is the 407). Streets tolled in this way would have dramatically less automotive traffic during peak hours (perhaps 80% less) and can then be used for bike lanes and RT (rapid transit). Those drivers wishing to take advantage of these routes to save peak-hour travel time might pay, say, 12 to 15 cents/km (i.e., less than the 407 fee of 18 cents or so). The revenue from these drivers would help fund the alterations needed to accommodate the bike lanes.
The beneficiaries of such a scheme would be:
- The TTC which would pay less per kilometer for such a RT scheme than they did for the St. Clair streetcar modifications.
- Transit users who can expect a significant timesaving due to less congestion on their route.
- Cyclists who will be safer.
- Parts of the new streetcar system that would be better in the company of more bikes and fewer cars.
- The people cycling on these new paths who will experience increased relative health benefits.
- Drivers who avoid this route and will experience less congestion because of increased bike use and increased transit use in the same travel corridor (even in winter, those cyclists that use these routes that revert to transit will likely use the transit in the same corridor).
- Some of the businesses along the route that will see more cycle traffic.
- The residents along the route who will experience a drop in pollutants
- Ontario, which would have an opportunity to test voluntary tolling programs in advance of their necessity due to falling fuel-tax revenue.
- Toronto, which would be able to add this program to their growing list of green initiatives to help them meet the promised 80% reduction in GHG (not much besides sleeping reduces GHG production more than biking).
How it works
A small telematics ‘black box’ is mounted on the windshield (just like a 407 ‘tolltag’). It gathers position information which it then turns into a toll amount (no position information leaves the ‘front-end’ system. When the vehicle is parked, the black box determines if any toll is owed for the prior journey (most roads are not payable), if it is payable a notice goes to a billing center saying how much is owed and to whom. An account (which may be “pre-paid/anonymous”) is then debited or a private, non-anonymous, account is charged. This is done without the ‘gantries’ that hover over the 407, because the positioning is done by GPS and the communication by build-in cellular. The black-box software that is used to be certain a car was on the road being charged for is sophisticated and involves a highly reliable form of GPS called financial-grade GPS for these kinds of applications. It is designed to be impossible to overcharge. The system is also designed so that it cannot be tracked (like a having a Garmin NUVI or a Tom Tom that only the driver can see. So security (anti-theft) features are not available on this system.
When the car leaves its parking spot, a similar determination is made to determine the parking fee for that spot, as described in Part I. Several other services, such as pay-as-you-drive insurance, loyalty rewards for parking, modality rewards for not driving during peak hours, and the like will soon be available.
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