Current Situation
Tolling systems have been used for many years to collect fees for usage of roads, bridges, and tunnels. In the past 15 years, the technology has increasingly been adopted to reduce peak traffic and pollution in major metro areas, such as London, Milan, and Singapore.
Goals and Objectives
Tolling and congestion charging programs have two main goals. They are intended to collect fees to pay for opex and capex of transportation infrastructure. They are meant to nudge the behavior of drivers, by encouraging them to drive less, thus generate less traffic and pollution. Increasingly, the systems and approaches used in tolling and congestion charging are expected to be applied to replace other sources of revenue, such as street parking fees and car taxes, as car ownership is reduced, and growth of electric vehicles increases the number of cars that are exempted from traditional taxation.
Technology Deployed
Hardware: Datacenter and cloud infrastructure, in-vehicle devices (e.g., transponders), and tolling station sensors (e.g., video cameras)
Software: CRM, billing and collection system, analytics and AI, enterprise asset management system for infrastructure maintenance
Services: Business and IT services
Use Case Summary
Tolling systems are a common fee collection approach applied to pay for transportation infrastructure that over time has been repurposed to reduce congestion and pollution. From a technology perspective, these systems have evolved from relying on specialized hardware, such as transponders, used to identify vehicles to video analytics and from custom built to commercial off-the-shelf billing systems.