ELECTRONIC ROAD PRICING AND TOLLING: A FULL MULTILANE SOLUTION

Most developed and developing countries are moving to get user pay for roads, to fund maintenance and road construction, to manage the demand, and to ease congestion in cities. A company called MAC got an early start by participating in the development of Telepass, an automatic toll collection system for single lane application. To respond to the most demanding requirements, a new system has been developed for full multilane environments for both urban and highway applications. The MAC system addresses the fundamental issue of detecting and localizing vehicles with different types of sensors with the highest precision to discriminate offending vehicles. An innovative design based on single access, small footprint communication areas and high resolution, tightly spaced vehicle sensors achieves a very high reliability rate in debiting users and catching offenders. Vehicle classification is integrated in the vehicle sensors. Pre-paid as well as post-paid schemes can be implemented by the same structure, which integrates car parking charges and congestion charges. Security against threats to defraud or discredit the system is guaranteed by the widespread use of encryption and mutual authentication techniques. User privacy is fully secured within the basic design, which does not require the knowledge of any IU identifier. The system has been successfully tested in the field.