Project News: RCI addresses business impact of interoperable tolling

Date: 12 July 2007

Special Session at the 6th European ITS Congress focuses on opportunities of cross-European interoperable tolling.

When will GNSS-based tolling systems become available through an open and competitive market? How can industry accelerate advancements needed for performance improvements, cost reductions and increased functionality? And how can toll service providers secure and extend the business case of toll service provisioning? The European Commission-supported RCI project, which is coordinated by ERTICO – ITS Europe, provided insight and answers to these questions and more at a Special Session on road charging at the Aalborg European ITS Congress in June.

During the session, the European Commission presented how its Directive 2004/52 mandates the availability of the European electronic tolling service.

The RCI project is halfway through its demonstration activities on how European specifications can be utilised in the major existing tolling and taxing environments in Europe. In Aalborg, the chair and co-chairs of the RCI Steering Committee showed how RCI’s published results are already supporting current and projected business developments in Europe.

An open and competitive market for tolling solutions requires stable European specifications that allow the various stakeholders to invest: suppliers to manufacture and invest in products, service providers to invest in new operations and policymakers to engage in new schemes throughout Europe – or beyond. It requires that relatively expensive in-vehicle units that would be deployed in Member State X work together (‘are interoperable’) with the tolling infrastructure in Member State Y.

It goes even further than that!
An open and competitive market requires that future infrastructure and policy to be deployed by a new tolling operator in Member State X is already interoperable with all of the existing in-vehicle units on the market in Member State Y.

Increased openness and competition through standardisation makes the tolling market horizontal. It enables the policymakers to better predict and control the costs of implementation, operation, maintenance and future updates of road user charging schemes. It also creates the conditions of a mass market for suppliers, enabling them to further invest in cost optimisations and a lower price per unit.

Standardisation also allows toll service providers to secure and possibly extend the business case of toll service provisioning.

More information on the RCI project can be found at http://www.ertico.com/rci