Technology is key to cutting congestion

The government announced a series of changes it wants to make to the country's transport infrastructure last week, including plans to cut congestion on the country's roads.

While the plans outlined in the Future of Transport white paper are largely long term initiatives, the government is looking to technology to sort out many of the problems that currently plague our roads.

Key to its congestion busting plans is a national roadpricing scheme that, if it gets the green light, will charge drivers dependent on when, where and how far they travel.

The government realises that it has to get public support before it can implement such a system, and has pledged to lead a national debate on how such a scheme would operate.

However, it has already pinpointed satellite tracking technology as a likely mechanism to implement any such system.

According to the Feasibility of Road Pricing in the UK report, which backs up the white paper, 'national charging based on distance will require location, which in turn means using positioning technology, possibly using satellite systems'.

The report raises concerns over the accuracy of GPS (global positioning satellite) technology that is in use today. However, GPS is old in technology years and it is American, although Europe is preparing to commercially launch its alternative, Galileo, in 2008.

'We estimate that the equipment necessary to deliver a full positioning charging scheme using satellite technology will not be available in a mass market, low cost form until at least 2014,' the report says. 'The launch of the Galileo satellite network, which is intended to go into commercial operation from 2008, will be a major step towards this particular solution, providing greater coverage and accuracy, even in the most challenging locations.'

The government realises that implementing a national road charging scheme will not be easy, immediate or cheap.

It estimates that it will cost around £3bn to get vehicles kitted out with the tracking technology, and up to £5bn a year to run the scheme, 'if optimism bias is added'.

Getting satellite tracking technology fitted to the country's 30 million cars, and then managing the systems and the data that is generated from the scheme will be an immense task, as the data associated motor transport explodes.

'I just see data exploding everywhere,' said analyst Meta Group transport expert Richard Clarke. 'But I don't see it as unmanageable. There will be more databases, more billing and more privacy issues, but I believe this is absolutely manageable. I believe the technology today exists to do this.'

The Institute for Public Policy Research(IPPR) published its In the fast lane, fair and effective road user changing in Britain report a couple of days before the government published its findings.

'Any system relying on GPS technology will result in an increase in data collection,' the IPPR report says. 'However, a system could be designed to minimise the amount of information collected and held by a central authority, and thereby allay public concerns about civil liberties.'

Clarke says the systems that support the road pricing scheme should mimic those used by the airline industry, which are highly transactional and handle millions of pieces of data a day.

'The challenge is the government's ability to contract manage this and govern the infrastructure once it is in place,' he said.

The government is looking to other related areas to see if it can take advantage of existing technology and processes.

'The government will need to consider the extent to which synergies and efficiencies with existing vehicle and driver services to could work to reduce the add-on costs of introducing road charging systems,' says the feasibility study.

'Registering drivers for any scheme, processing records of vehicle movements into charges, and issuing these charges as bills to drivers would require a significant back-office operation and, given the number of vehicles, significant cost. However, it is possible to run these sorts of operations in conjunction with existing services such as those provided by the DVLA,' it says.

But Clarke says government databases already in place are small in comparison to what would be needed to support the road scheme.

'The DVLA, the passport service or whatever, these databases are all diddy and non-transactional,' he said.

Tony Lacy, director of strategy for transport at Atos Origin, says the government will have to look beyond the technology of these systems and processes if the scheme is to work properly.

'For me, it's not necessarily about the IT system and the size of it and dealing with the scale of the data. There are big systems everywhere in banking and telecommunications,' said Lacy.

'It's not just about having a big box somewhere with a big database, it's about having all the things that go along side it, that the data is secure, that the party dealing with it are dealing with issues like compliance,' he said.

The government will be able to get a better of idea of the challenges it faces when it launches the Lorry Road User Charge (LRUC) in 2008.

The project will charge haulage firms dependent on when and where the UK's 425,000 lorries have travelled using GPS technology, as well as taking into account reductions in fuel tax.

Karen Dee, director of policy at the Road Haulage Association points out that the project has already had to be put back two years from 2006.

'The government has launched the initial procurement for LRUC and it's going to be a massive back office function,' Dee said.

'This is a very complex system because it has to link and balance with the reductions in fuel tax which will put us on a par with Europe. It's already been delayed once. It's a sledge hammer and a nut scenario,' she said.