Multilane Free-Flow Tolling Systems- big pictures

Multilane Free-Flow Tolling: Big Pictures

25 January 2022

Big Pictures: it is often the case that the best way to express an idea or concept is to use a big picture. What follows are five pictures that give insight into what tolling systems are for and the way tolling operates.

The Rich Picture

The Rich Picture - rich pictures are a diagrammatic way of relating your own experiences and perceptions to a given problem situation through the identification and linking of a series of concepts. In this case a picture is being used to capture all the elements and concepts around charging for infrastructure usage - as a simple extension of road user charging or tolling. Infrastructure will be built and maintained if there is a consistent revenue stream associated with it.

The Infrastructure Usage Charge and MaaS

An Infrastructure Usage Charge. This picture exposes the composition of charges for infrastructure usage. Any charge would likely consist of several components:

The return on the investment needed to create the asset,
The ongoing costs to operate and maintain the asset, which may include rent and Government concession fees,
For an operator who provides a service by using the asset, the return on the investment they have made in their business,
The ongoing operational costs of that business, which includes an "asset usage" charge,
Finally realised as a fee for service such as the cost of a rail ticket, or the money charged for a rideshare trip.

What is interesting to note is that a road user charge is slightly different to the others when it comes to private vehicle owners. Those owners bear the costs associated with the maintenance of their vehicles. The road user charge is directly related to the costs of the road infrastructure and operating the charge, rather than supplying a vehicle based transport service.

These transport services and their associated fees are the building blocks of a mobility as a service (MaaS) offering and sitting at the heart of that is the concept of the transport account - all your travel needs ordered and paid for in the one place. Over recent years there has been a lot of talk about MaaS, how it will be with us very soon and our lives will change for ever - much like connected and autonomous vehicles. The fact that it hasn't really materialised speaks to the complicated nature of transport systems and fully resolving the classic business equation - does the MaaS system produce value that justifies its cost, and who pays for it?

What would you expect from a MaaS system? Surely, as a minimum:

It has to handle payments across your mobility providers,
It should be advising you as to the best travel options for a journey on any given day,
It will arrange transport options for you - if things need to be booked - at the best rates possible, and
It will give you meaningful analytics on your journeys so you can see how well (or badly) you are doing.

If it did all that would you pay for it?

Revenue Leakage part 1

Revenue Leakage I. Unfortunately it is the case that every tolling system suffers some form of revenue leakage. The causes of that leakage are many and varied and explored in the Tolling System Revenue Leakage Elimination Map - this picture and the one below. These pictures have been drawn based on the assumption that the tolling system has an architecture similar to that presented in the tolling system overview document.

Revenue Leakage part 2

Revenue Leakage II. The second part of the Tolling System Revenue Leakage Elimination Map.

The Business Capability Model

The Business Capability Model. This picture explores all the business capabilities required by a road user charging organisation. It assumes that organisation issues some kind of tag or onboard unit and has the ability to process images. It also presumes that the organisation is part of a wider mobility as a service network and shares data with that network.

Special thanks to Luperi for the wheel zoom javascript.