GPS PAYD ROI — Have They Thought This Through?

Government admits struggle to sell road pricing scheme

Hélène Mulholland and agencies
Wednesday January 10, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Traffic in London. Photograph: the Guardian.

Downing Street today acknowledged that ministers faced a struggle to win public support for road pricing.

A petition posted on the No 10 website protesting against the proposals has already notched up over 160,000 signatures.

The prime minister’s official spokesman accepted that the idea of charging motorists for every mile they drive has aroused strong feelings.

However, he stressed that action was essential to prevent congestion getting out of control.

The scheme, currently being piloted in a number of areas, uses satellite-tracking technology to charge motorists for using certain roads. Prices vary depending on the location and the time of day…. Full Guardian article here:

A lot of stories are landing in the in-box lately about PAYD (Pay As You Drive) schemes.  I’ve been covering the subject often,here, here, here and here for just a few reports.  What we need to do here is separate the idea of PAYD from the somewhat ill-thought out technical solutions being proposed by officials ignorant of technology and some vendors who seem eager to sell a solution, even if it’s wrong.

In the world of formal, government communications and information technology programs usually follow the requirement/tech solution/implementation road map.  One doesn’t (if they are smart) implement  a tech solution before they have the requirement defined.  Many ill-fated programs have the root cause of their failure laid at the step of the customer who started out by telling IT the solution he wanted … instead of letting the right folks devise the proper solution.

The Requirement:

Reduce traffic on key roads so that overall traffic flow avoids gridlock whenever possible.  To me, that’s all that should be stated.  To decide to charge people more for certain roads is a potential solution, it’s not at all the requirement.  Aside from improving traffic slow I see no reason at all for the government denying the free and convenient use of the roads the citizens paid for, do you?

Some Possible Tech Solutions:

• Raise fuel taxes.  Simple, isn’t it?  But here’s the advantages:  First of all it’s a taxation already imposed and the infrastructure to collect it is already in place.  It’s totally democratic … the more you drive the more you pay, the bigger your car the more you pay, etc.  Will it induce anyone to take alternate routes?  Not likely but if you reduce the overall flow of traffic both desirable and less desirable roads will be able to continue serving the public.  As fortuitous fallout from this solution you’ll cut overall driving, oil consumption, road injuries and the emission of green house gasses.  Pretty much an all positive idea.
• Charge By Specific Roads: There is already a well established way to both finance highways and control access.  It’s called a toll road.  Either by means of conventional toll barrier schemes or the much easier and cheaper idea of billing cars upon entry and exit with simple ALPR Automatic License Plate recognition devices.  See here, for example. This idea requires more infrastructure but has the advantage of being easily applied to specific areas and those areas can be expanded, moved or done away with a population density and traffic issues change.
• GPS Track All Cars:  friends, I’m Mr. GPS. (Tim Says So) I love the technology, have made my living with it for years and am a firm believer that the uses of GPS have only begun to be tapped.  But just like I wouldn’t advise a 16 pound sledge hammer to swat a fly, I would not advise using GPS tracking for this project.  There is no ROI.  The infrastructure costs would be significant.  keeping all the units in hundreds of thousands of cars working would be a maintenance nightmare, and there are huge, real privacy concerns.  How has the data, who can view the data, how long is the data kept … the list goes on and on.  But by far the worst aspect of trying to select the GPS tracking tool for the wrong application is this … the data itself.  You can buy ten or a hundred or even a thousand GPS trackers to keep tabs on specific vehicles and see tremendous advantages.  But the sheer volume of information a scheme like this would collect is gigantic.  The data processing of reviewing all the tracking information, correlating it with location, time of day, etc. is an immense task and it grows exponentially as the number of cars and the number of miles increases.  Very ill advised.

There’s a lot of old sayings that could apply, the one most appropriate might be, “when your only tool is a hammer, it’s hard not to see the world as a nail.”  GPS is the wrong tool for this idea and pursuing this course is a huge, huge mistake.