Unsticking the traffic

Measures are required to control the growth in traffic congestion. The author identifies road pricing, particularly global positioning system (GPS)-based mobility systems, as the keystone to transport policies. Two current design problems associated with privacy protection and the pricing of individual roads are discussed. These lead to pricing inflexibility, complexity, toll evasion, system expense, system fragility and human factor issues. New approaches to the use of GPS for road pricing are considered. Skymeter Mobility Pricing Services, under development at Applied Location Corporation, allows for hassle-free metering, billing and collection for road pricing, satellite-based parking and pay-as-you-drive insurance using one onboard unit (OBU), one central process and one bill. The three travel log variants of the Skymeter OBU are described: the parklog, the congestion log, and the full track log.