Wicked Problems

I finally completed the white paper I promised back in October about wicked problems. Here it is.

Electromagnetic road pricing

Many ideas are bubbling up to address the driving range of electric vehicles (EVs). This one (thanks Leon), albeit with a large infrastructure hurdle, would compound the need for road pricing, because the road itself would be charging the batteries.

There is also a lot of resistance to the electric vehicle. David Booth (aka Motormouth), is adamant that EVs are losers and is one of Canada's leading automotive journalists. We should ask why, shouldn’t we?

Booth is adamant EVs are losers in order to sell print. Few readers of newsprint want to read that EVs are improving, that there is a small and growing market, that current demand outstrips supply, that there are many thousands of engineers working on the problem? Such readers want to know which car to buy now. This year.

And no one wants a lecture about how demand grows markets, that markets push technology, that disruption feeds demand, that unexpected breakthroughs happen, and that tomorrow is generally like today only in structure but never in detail. Not everyone needs to buy an EV to change the equation Booth thinks cannot change.

But what happens after 10% do?

~~~~~

Booth is one of Canada's leading automotive journalists, because newspapers sell cars, and damning EVs is good for the ad-men for the internal combustion engine (ICE). The truth about EVs is that at some point there will be a lot more of them, that they will serve some subset of the market (likely between 20-60% by 2050), that they will demand some thought from engineers that worry about electricity grids (they are already thinking), that they will worsen congestion, that as soon as they hit 5-7%, they will force the institution of road-use charging, that users of ICEs will pay both fuel tax and road use charges, and that that will accelerate EV sales.

Booth is right that only a small group of greenies will today sacrifice long-haul travel for the feel-good of owning an EV. But as soon as that small group is large enough to force government’s hand to deal with mess road funding is currently in, a tipping point will occur. The evolution of battery and charging technology is just that – evolutionary. The revolution will come from a tax shift.

If Booth were to encourage readers to anticipate the EV, a small percentage of people might wait one or two more years before they get their next car – just in case selection improves. This is not a good thing for newspapers who rely on automotive ads.

How electric cars and pay-as-you-go are connected

Shifting to electric vehicles interests me for two issues: How do we encourage people to switch and how will they pay for road use after they switch?

In the past, I have discussed a new market ecosystem for power, e-cars and road-pricing. As well, I noted the manner in which the Danes elected to encourage the uptake of electric cars (excessive, perhaps, but right-minded).

Recently, Streetsblog, described a new report (Exploring Electric Vehicle Adoption in New York City) from the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. (more)

To summarize the summary for the twitter attention span:

1. Electric vehicles could help achieve New York City’s sustainability goals.
2. The Federal Government is aggressively supporting EV development.
3. There is a potentially large group of early adopters willing to change behavior to accommodate electric vehicles.
4. These early adopters will likely outstrip the available supply of EVs to the New York market for at least the next five years.
5. The study suggests targeting early policy actions to those issues that early adopters find most important. Efforts focused on other consumer segments should wait for several years.
6. Early adopters do not appear to need a high-density public charging network or local tax incentives.
7. The projected level of adoption of EVs should not threaten the stability of the electric grid as long as most chargers are “smart”, allowing charging to take place during off-peak hours.
8. An opportunity exists for industry stakeholders to partner to prepare for, and encourage, EV early adoption.

The study also suggests targeting early policy actions to the issues that early adopters find most important. Efforts focused on other consumer segments should wait for several years. I would suggest, instead, focusing on ways to expand the pool of early adopters. The very early adopters hardly need incentives.

So what about pay-as-you-go?
The Mayor's report (above) lists a number of early incentives on page 19. Some of these can be delivered and the list can be extended with on-board devices that manage parking (for payment automation, parking finders, loyalty programs and green-rewards), and pay-as-you-drive insurance. So on the uptake side, technology can deliver value to encourage EV purchase, but once penetration starts, how are these vehicles to pay for road use? You can forget taxing electricity at the rates required for road user fees. The answer is some form of road-use charging, and TDP is the best. So if NYC said, "here are a handful of financial incentives, and the easy way to get them is with a road-use meter," NYC would have those early adopters establish the installed base of road-use meters for road use charging by 2015-2020, as will be needed anyway.

Win-Win.

Toronto public parking and the upcoming municipal election

Toronto Councillor Karen Stintz mentions the possibility of monetizing Toronto Parking in a BOT guest blog, today:

While talk about selling any one particular asset is premature and distracting, it is not premature to figure out how we might be able to do it. … For example, consider the Toronto Parking Authority (TPA). Currently, the TPA provides low-cost parking to residents and returns modest revenues to the City. The strategic objective of the TPA is to consolidate land and in some instances, sell it off for development purposes. In its current form, there is no reason that the city needs to manage this asset. However, the TPA has the potential to become a vital component in the green agenda if parking lots can also be used as filling stations for electric cars. Suddenly, the public interest is very different from our original thinking.

The subject of selling, or more likely leasing, City assets is critical and not at all premature. There are many pros and cons. There are many ways to make errors. And we clearly need to manage debt.

There are two key criteria: The first is that the use of proceeds must replace value lost with even greater new value gained. Today at the board of trade, Dana Levenson from the Royal Bank of Scotland described several asset sales made by the City of Chicago as returning great value to the citizens of that city and others that performed less well. Toronto Council members should closely study those lessons.

The second is that the assets under consideration need to be correctly valued. And here I am concerned that Toronto’s public parking garages, lots and street meters are very likely to be critically undervalued.

An article in the National Post on Monday Jan 18th included a very short mention of the possibility of monetizing an operating contract for these Toronto Parking Authority assets. To quote from the article “The city's wholly owned parking operations generate about $55-million in profit every year. …anywhere from $200-million to $500-million could be made if the operating contract was monetized…’. You will recognize the text-book “7-times revenue” equation for valuation.

When Chicago monetized its public parking a short while back, the new operator almost immediately raised prices, extended hours and turned a poorly-managed city asset into a far more efficient money generator for its shareholders. This tells me that in the City’s (Chicago’s) hands that asset was underperforming and by extension was underpriced when monetized.

Toronto’s public parking assets are worth much more than $200-500 million both to Toronto’s bottom line and to our city’s livability, if left in the city’s hands and re-priced to market value – i.e., prices made variable, raised to achieve Shoup’s 15% vacancy, hours extended to 70% vacancy, and priced parking deployed far more broadly (which also reduces congestion).

If our City currently generates $55M net as the Post article claims, then the City’s gross revenue would be on the order of 150-160M given that municipal parking operations (when they are as badly underpriced as they are in Toronto) consume between 60% to 70% of revenue. If pricing were doubled (which is likely a minimum needed for the effects listed), and the operator kept hours and enforcement methods the same, the operating profit would be more like $210M – a far cry from 55M. Suddenly the asset would be worth between 800M and $2B, using the same multipliers as the Post implies, since the new revenue all go to Toronto’s bottom line. If hours and areas were extended, valuation further increases dramatically. Your idea of charging electric vehicles adds yet more to the livability equation.

But without Councillor courage, we are better to monetize the asset for the immediate financial relief and let the new operator raise prices to market value and charge electric vehicles in order to make our city more livable.

But what a shame that we ‘poor voting members of the public’ might not share in that new revenue. Any such ‘poor voter’ who thinks he or she will continue to get “low-cost parking” after monetization, as you correctly describe this gift to our motorists, is fiddling while our City burns.

Fix parking pricing and you fix a lot of other things with it.

Americans Abroad

Over the past few months a group of 10 US transportation experts from USDOT, six state DOTs and a private-sector consultant, engaged in a fact-finding mission re what the rest of the world is doing re road pricing. They called their project: “International Scan: Reducing Congestion and Funding Transportation Using Variable Road Pricing” and visited or examined the usual suspects: Germany, London, Netherlands, Singapore, Stockholm, as well as the Czech Republic, newly added to the slowly growing list.

Last Wednesday, 2010.02.03, the group presented a 90-minute webinar, which I recommend to road-pricing newbies. The recording of the webinar will be posted here by 2010.02.10. In Europe, where I have focused much of my work in the past seven years re road pricing, I have more than once heard the comment that "Americans do not learn from us". That is clearly not true in this case (as an American, the criticism had rankled me).

Something new that I learned from the Webinar: “Singapore estimates that the gas tax would need to be raised by $3 to achieve the same traffic reduction results as a $1 increase in their electronic road pricing system due to transparency of the charge.” This is not surprising in principle, but it is in scale. I wonder if any economists can comment?

There is a lot to learn from the European experience. We can learn about behavioral effects, expected decrements in bad things and increments in good things, about the quicksand of referenda (although our own Johanna Zmud can teach us as much), we can learn about expense, courage and complexity and perhaps something about attitudes (although that is blunted by our poor comparative record on fuel taxation so Americans' entitled attitudes toward "paying differently" will be harder to crack than the Europeans’ (except for the Brits')).

But there is also a lot not to learn. We should not copy any European system wholesale -- in fact, I hope no EU jurisdiction does (although Gothenburg threatens a carbon copy of Stockholm), as each of the current examples has flaws (the London Congestion Charge), each had specific constraints (the Swedish tax law), specific geographies (the most successful was a peninsular island, the most scared is below sea-level), specific leaders (Livingston), specific types of government (Singapore) and specific and twisted deployment histories (Czech Rep and Germany).

It is also the case that the technology developed by 2009 is far more economically efficient and effective, such that if re-done using what is now available, London would not likely be using fixed-position cameras (not because of privacy, since they already have cameras galore, but because those cameras robbed TfL of system flexibility, extensibility and scalability. It is known that Singapore is looking to upgrade (for the second time!) to a newer technology. One cannot make this claim about Stockholm, because it is their atavistic tax laws that chose cameras (only their 2nd best technical option at the time and now their 3rd best), nor would Germany’s system be very different from what it is, except it would be less expensive -- but that is always to be expected.

As an example of cross-fertilization of ideas I wrote How to toll a country for free for the Czech Republic. It's an extension of the some forward American thinking out of the FHWA in the face of the two most difficult American stumbling blocks to TDP road use charging (variable VMT charging): hyper-dependency on the automobile and a badly-misshapen fuel-tax policy history.

The future of car use payment is here

Here is a preview of car rentals and car sharing. [thank you Russell] Hop in, record usage by distance and duration, and hop out. Only two things are missing – time of trip and location of travel. Imagine adding, as almost certainly will be added, a variable fee depending on time of day/day of week and place of travel – specifically set up to charge less for uncongested times and places. [Just like the airlines do, now.]

A small on-board computer – a “road-use-meter” – will translate location time, place and distance information into a fee in a way that protects privacy (even providing anonymity) and charges the user appropriately.

Why do all this? Well, it is easy to see that the company that owns the cars will want to be paid according to how long a car is in the possession of a user (duration) and by how much wear-and-tear has occurred (distance driven). As well, distance driven will relate to a road-use fee, since the subject vehicles do not use petrol.

But why time or day of trip? And why location of travel? These latter two measurements relate to congestion. If usage-prices differ in these ways, then traffic managers can reduce congestion by charging less at non-peak times and places.

As well, road-use pricing like this is expected be used before long for privately owned cars, whether they are propelled by an electric motor or not.

Programs like these mean we’ll need to build fewer roads, we’ll generate fewer emissions and we’ll endure less gridlock for the same vehicle miles traveled. In many countries – those with currently high fuel taxes – it will be possible to lower travel costs for those drivers who can avoid peak times and places.

Sell GreenP? NO WAY!

Toronto Mayoralty Candidates Eye Asset Sales

National Post 2010.01.18. An article in Monday’s Post included a very short mention of the possibility of monetizing an operating contract for Toronto Parking Authority assets to raise money for a broke Toronto:

The city's wholly owned parking operations generate about $55-million in profit every year. The blue-ribbon panel provided estimates, still considered accurate, that say anywhere from $200-million to $500-million could be made if the operating contract was monetized over a period of time. There are also 150 parking lots, such as the City Hall garage or the Dundas Square garage, that could be sold.

Chicago did this a short while ago. Raised an obscene amount of money for that city. What happened? The new operator (no fool, he), raised prices, extended hours and generally found a way to shorten his ROI, all the while shoveling Dave Driver’s doubled dough into his shareholder’s pockets.

The Toronto parking asset is worth much more to us who live in the city if left in the city’s hands and re-priced to market value: prices made variable, raised to hit 15% vacancy, hours extended to 70% vacancy, and spread the good cheer to all the streets that are unpriced, underpriced, abused, tire-marked, and only occasionally enforced.

If the City currently generates $55M net as this article claims, then the City’s gross revenue would be on the order of 150-160M given that municipal parking operations (when they are as badly underpriced as they are in Toronto) consume between 60% and 70% of revenue. If pricing were doubled (Toronto needs this to control congestion), and the operator kept hours and enforcement the same, the operating profit would be more like $210M – a far cry from 55M. Suddenly the asset would be worth between 800M and $2B, using the same multipliers as reported, since the new revenue all go to Toronto’s bottom line.

Either way Mary Motorist pays 50% of current garage fees instead of 25% (still a steal), but my way the city (and its citizens) get the benefit. The Chicago method that the Post’s article contemplates means that some company’s shareholders get your dough instead.

And all this because City Council does not understand markets and arrives at work without courage.

Folks, it’s our city. Parking is about to get more expensive. Where should the money go? To our starving, pot-holed, Metropolis or to somebody's rich uncle?

Keep GreenP, and raise prices to market value.

RAC – The Congestion Challenge

In July 2009, UK’s RAC Foundation*, sponsored a study. It’s foreword, copied here in its entirely, deserves to be widely read. I will comment next week on a way out of the very real challenge it exposes -- and a challenge that may affect a country near you.

FOREWORD

In an age where the political emphasis is on reducing car use, it is perhaps worth reminding those who run the country of a stark reality; over three-quarters of drivers would find it difficult to adjust their lifestyles to being without a car.

That is just one of the findings of this joint RAC Foundation / Ipsos MORI report which provides a barometer of opinion about car use and congestion, at a time when environmental policy is aiming to deliver important climate change objectives during great economic uncertainty. It underlines the importance of taking the needs and views of road users into account when developing a strategy in this area. Policy must not be developed without regard for public opinion, or at least the need for public explanation.

And here are a few more things to bear in mind. Congestion, although still considered a serious problem by two in every five motorists, is not thought to be as big an issue as it was ten years ago. This is a marked shift in opinion, created not by reduced traffic volumes, but because motorists appear to have reluctantly accepted the phenomenon of congestion, and believe it will only get worse in the future, particularly on motorways.

Improvements to the situation are considered unlikely and supposedly radical solutions like road pricing carry decreasing support. Additional charges for travel into town centres and motorways, no matter what the caveat, are unpopular, even more so than at the beginning of the decade – witness the resounding defeat of the Manchester TIF scheme in the referendum of December 2008.

Unsurprisingly support is highest for the options that cost the ‘public purse’ rather than the individual, such as public transport improvements. However previous backing for these initiatives has not translated into a change in people’s travel behaviour. In fact, there was actually a greater willingness to swap from the car to another mode of transport ten years ago.

Managing motorways better, through hard shoulder running and the adjustment of motorway speed limits during periods of high congestion, was generally welcomed, and more than six out of ten people favoured the widening of existing motorways where there were congestion problems, a similar level of support to measures that increase the number and frequency of bus services.

But on the whole, drivers remain unconvinced by alternative modes of travel - so much so that over half would rather take the chance of being stuck in a traffic jam than get on public transport. Only three out of ten people think it is likely they will use public transport to make a journey they currently make by car over the next year. This appears to illustrate both a reluctance to change behaviour and also disappointment with the alternatives that currently exist. Despite Government rhetoric about improving public transport, fewer than three in ten people are optimistic about its future, with the majority believing performance will stay the same or get worse.

The resounding message is that the travelling public are extremely pessimistic, and resigned to a future without performance improvements across the various transport modes. Those who anticipate a worsening in traffic congestion over the coming years are no more inclined to support any form of road pricing, in fact they are more likely to oppose policies, which could improve the situation. A stalemate seems to have arisen.

A radically different – or rather, a radically better – future is hard for individuals to grasp and accept. And while there is apparent widespread support for improving public transport, it is clear that for many it will never be an alternative to the car. The challenge then is to make the vehicles people use smaller and greener.

In the short term more can be done to enhance the ‘performance’ of the road network such as providing motorists with reliable journey times. The Highways Agency’s Managed Motorways scheme has started to do this and politicians must ensure it has the money to see it through.

Longer term, any more radical changes to the way drivers use the road system – possibly through the introduction of national road pricing – have to be implemented with public support. Convincing sceptical motorists of the merit of such fundamental shifts in policy will not be easy. But that is no reason not to do it.

[signed]

Professor Stephen Glaister
Director
Royal Automobile Club Foundation

~~~

The RAC Foundation, a registered UK charity, was originally set up in 1991 fundamentally as a research arm of RAC. Following the de-merger and sale of RAC in 1999, the Foundation took on a new and wider role to include researching and promoting issues of safety, mobility, economics and the environment. The Foundation explores the economic, mobility, safety and environmental issues relating to roads and the use of motor vehicles, and campaigns to secure a fair deal for responsible road users. Independent and authoritative research for the public benefit and informed debate are central to the RAC Foundation’s standing. (from the RAC Foundation site.)

Forget green, your time is more valuable

A Manhattan congestion pricing activist, Charles Komanoff, has achieved the unthinkable. He wrote a very competent argument 10.01.06 “With Congestion Pricing, Saving Time Trumps Reducing Pollution” and most of the numerous responses both pro and con were reasonably intelligent. That alone is one proud achievement in the CP debate.

Komanoff argues that the current value of time lost to congestion far outweighs the cost of incremental emissions caused. Scandal.

I do not like to surrender any argument for CP: productivity, time, emissions, funding, livability, health, national security (oil wars), etc. Right now a non-trivial portion of the developed world might profess to be more concerned about the environment than personal time budgets – at least many more than are willing to follow the arguments in and after his blog. Even though I largely accept Komanoff’s analysis, I don’t want to abandon those people who are pro CP for green reasons.

However, Komanoff’s argument – even if it were NOT backed up with data – is far-sighted. The reason that I have until about a year ago left emissions OUT of my arguments is that I am an optimist about technology, but not about people. However much of the CP fight trades on emissions will be eroded as green cars arrive. “What, me worry, I have an electric car!” Zoom. Zoom.

Electrification will prove Komanoff prescient.

Future car

Parallel developments in automotive telematics will lower costs of, and enable the move to, TDP/VMT road-pricing.

In the Financial Post, 09.12.31, Nicolas Van Praet writes about a number of things we can expect to raise the IQ of our wheels in the future.

For these new carbrains he predicts expanded capabilities for entertainment, information, and some very smart navigation and safety features. Some them could integrate navigation and safety very tightly, indeed:

Carmakers … are spending a lot of time and money thinking about how to incorporate next-generation mobile communications technology …. They're also trying to figure out how to respond to a demographic change of immense consequences. Sometime over the next decade, the world's population aged 65 and older will outnumber children under five for the first time... The number of seniors is growing at an average of 870,000 each month. Many of those older people are in better health than ever before. And many will want to continue driving. They will need help to do that, "in a sense, to keep them safe from each other …envision you're driving down a piece of road that you … [are] unfamiliar with. The GPS system knows exactly where you are … and it knows that it's night, that you're heading toward a mountain road hairpin turn, and that you're going too fast. You know none of this. But the car suddenly starts to slow down, literally takes complete control of the vehicle away from you."

Many of these carsmarts are already available as individual components and there are experimental systems that are designed to decide if you are going too fast for a particular context, and there are even prototype attempts to decide if a vehicle approaching an intersection is likely to be hit by another approaching the same intersection. So with all this automotive telematics engineering in progress at the same time that the market is churning out 65-year olds at the rate of 870,000 month, one can safely predict that demand will coalesce a new market for bundled telematics as we can barely imagine. A single sleek device, targeted after market at first and maybe factory installed as it matures, that will offer as many features in 2011 or 2012 as the laptop did in 2002 or the smartphone in 2008.

But consider another change that is approaching in the same timeframe – pay-as-you-go systems for parking, insurance, and road-use payments. These also need to be tightly coupled to positioning technology, although perhaps one that is more reliable than today’s navigation-grade GPS.

Cramming information (internet node), safety, entertainment, navigation, trip optimization, traveler services, and payment systems into a single system (actually, as apps on a single positioning and communication platform) is not only possible, but desirable. Desirable because dashboard or windscreen real estate is hugely valuable. Desirable because bundling will save motorists a ton of dough compared to purchasing six or ten different systems (my dash is already cluttered with my satellite radio, a GPS and a smartphone – the later two having multiple apps already).

So what will come first? (A) a sophisticated, factory installed, positioning-navigation-safety-management system? (B) a sophisticated aftermarket, self-installed, positioning-payment-management system? Or (C) a couple of generations of after-market systems that attempt some of each until we get it right for factory installation?

Considering that this is a complex integration problem, that we are not yet able to clearly understand the entire requirement, that there will be well over a billion cars on the road shortly, and that only market experience can fully anneal a competent set of system designs (the first cell phones were losers, no?), the correct answer is likely (C).

One of the things that (C) does for governments impatient to move away from the unsustainable fuel tax, is to give them a telematics platform that has some desirable – soon indispensable – features to host, sugar-coat and even help pay for road-pricing payment services.

This means that the upcoming demand for automotive-telematics-based information, safety, entertainment, navigation, trip optimization and traveler information is likely to be a critically important factor to fund the platform for the upcoming shift from pay-by-fuel-tax to pay-by-road-use.

Drive Less, Pay Less

I can be lazy and you can still have a good read.

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:

1. Infrastructure costs are reduced which enables expansion of managed parking.
2. Enforcement costs are reduced permitting the same parking officers to manage an expanded area of municipal parking.
3. 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.
4. The reduction of underpriced or unpriced parking reduces urban street congestion.

The advantages of satellite-based parking for a driver are:

1. No need to pay each time you park.
2. Pay only for the minutes used.
3. Can overstay without ticket-anxiety.
4. No parking tickets for expired meters.
5. Expense management for business users (note that parking payments may be a business expense, while a parking citation is generally not).
6. Able to purchase PAYD insurance (to save money).
7. Able to pay existing (and new!) road-tolls with the same device.

The steps a municipal government must take to permit satellite-based parking:

1. Permit one or more satellite-parking operators to meter and collect payment for your municipal parking spaces, lots and garages.
2. 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).
3. 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!)
4. 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.
5. Offer a startup incentive such a credit on account for the first several hundred users.
6. Design rewards for drivers to encourage both less driving and the use of satellite-based, in-car meters.

The advantage to Departments of Transportation is that voluntary adoption of road-use/parking-use meters permits governments to watch the technology develop and ascertain its reliability at very little risk, while users become accustomed to its fairness, convenience and privacy protection.

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.