The startup of Germany's ambitious system for tolling trucks on the 12,000km (7.5k mi) nationwide autobahn (motorway) system is now due for November 2. That is a two month delay. It follows complaints that not enough of the On-Board Units (OBUs) are available and many concerns about possible "chaos." The fears were stirred partly by rivals and opponents, but mostly by trucking companies and their trade... MORE
The startup of Germany's ambitious system for tolling trucks on the 12,000km (7.5k mi) nationwide autobahn (motorway) system is now due for November 2. That is a two month delay. It follows complaints that not enough of the On-Board Units (OBUs) are available and many concerns about possible "chaos." The fears were stirred partly by rivals and opponents, but mostly by trucking companies and their trade associations. Early August a memo from the federal office for freight (BAG) was leaked to the press expressing concern the system wasn't ready for an August 31 start. Toll Collect GmbH, the company responsible for development, installation, finance and operations for 12 years responded that the memo was based on out of date numbers but Manfred Stolpe the German Transport Minister nevertheless announced deferral a month before the due start.
The Toll Collect scheme, as it is branded, is the first attempt by a substantial country to introduce tolling nationwide in one step, and the first in the world to rely mainly on satellite based GPS position finding to record when the vehicle is on a tollable road and how far it goes on the road. With this one move the Germans are tolling half as much again as the total length of tollroads in the US - 7,900km (4,950mi) - albeit only for trucks over 12t gross weight (26.5k pds).
They are putting in place a national toll system that could readily be extended to other vehicle classes, even all, motor vehicles.
Toll Collect (TC) making use of satellite positioning, odometers, conventional shortrange electronic tolling and off-road payment by occasional users is clearly a model for the one-shot imposition of tolls over a whole roadway network.
TC Manager Michael Rummel put the best face on the delay. TC had repeatedly said no delay was needed but after the federal minister for transport ordered the delay, Rummel said it was all for the good. The system could be tested with tens of thousands of real trucks and real drivers.
There were some reports of "technical problems" in the OBUs which make heavy use of satellite GPS signals for position finding, but only time and widespread operation will tell whether these are small easily fixed matters, or more serious.
The biggest issue has been the scarcity of boxes or On Board Units (OBUs) as the Europeans term the transponders and the in-vehicle computing gear. As of end-July Toll Collect GmbH (TC) had only delivered 100k compared to the 450k once promised on start-up. TC then said only 150k were required by start-up. In any case TC has suffered some loss of confidence through multiple numbers and an apparently small proportion of trucks getting OBUs. Trucking companies complained that TC won't even take orders let alone deliver the units they want.
Users pay $300 for an OBU, a sum which approximately covers 4-hours technician installation costs but pays nothing toward the cost of manufacturing the unit, about $600.
Potentially 1.5m trucks could use the system when fully operational.
The flipside of the "shortage" of OBUs is that it represents a complete flop for the calls for boycotting the system by its opponents. Instead the truckers were flaying the new tollster for not being able to supply enough boxes.
Earlier there was talk among European bureaucrats that Germany should delay its truck tolling, and wait on the Union as a whole introducing a Europe-wide system. But that is years away. The European Commission investigated complaints that German government support to truckers on their OBUs violates fair competition regulations, but announced rejection of that mid-August.
Nevertheless at the time the nine week delay was decided two executives at T-Systems, the leading contractor for the Toll Collect system integration, were dismissed, apparently because of shortcomings in the their management of the project. (IDG News 2003-08-12) TC literature has been suffused with smug puffery, "Perfection with all components," "Everything under control," "Competence every step of the way," etc, so among more experienced toll people in Europe there is a definite schadenfreude or malicious pleasure at upstart Daimler's troubles.
Test of GPS
Toll Collect depends more heavily on satellite location (GPS) equipment than any other toll system implemented to date. Trucks in Switzerland carry a GPS equipped transponder under a truck toll system which began operations Jan 1 2001. But in the Swiss OBU the GPS together with motion sensing plays a backup and checking role in the OBU whose primary inputs come from an odometer/tachograph and CEN TC278 DSRC or shortrange wireless.
The German OBUs are modular and designed to have DSRC transponders or digital odometers (called tachographs in Europe) plugged in as well as GPS position data. The OBU systems have a Kalman filter methodology which can take the same data from different sources, and integrate it. But for now they don't have alternate modes fully implemented so, for starters at least, the boxes will be entirely dependent on the quality of GPS location finding.
DSRC is being used for truck-roadside communications at the 300 over-the-road gantries, so if GPS shortcomings are serious they are well placed to increase their use of DSRC for trip length records.
The German Government gave Toll Collect very little time to build the system so it is hardly surprising they have had difficulty meeting deadlines. The contract was not finally signed until August 2002 making the project just one year to start-up time. In Toll Collect's favor was the fact that there were years of trials and indeed its OBUs are a spinoff of an existing unit used for fleet management and various truck telematics. Still, the sheer logistics of getting the infrastructure in place to inform, supply and service 1.5m truckers has been a major challenge, and they should be excused some missteps, however unGerman that may be. The TC-government contract provides a grace period of three months lateness before monetary penalties kick in.
As with the startup of any new tollroad a slow uptake of automatic transponders or on-board units (OBUs) causes anxiety about the more labor intensive payment modes being overwhelmed. If that occurs there is a thunderous volume of complaints and many angry people testing the system with violations.
For trucks without OBUs toll payment will be via the internet, call centers or at an eventual 3,000 point-of-sale terminals which will take cash (in Euros only) or cards. Many truckers in Europe already have cards issued by oil companies and most of these are being accepted for payment at toll terminals. The toll terminals allow a selection of german, english, polish and french.
Toll Collect headquartered in the capital Berlin is made up of DaimlerChrysler 45%, Deutsche Telekom 45%, and Cofiroute 10% under contract to the national government. Daimler previously was involved under the name "debis Services."
Traffic and revenue risk is taken by the German Government which has said the profits will be used to enhance the autobahn system including 3rd laning, interchange rebuilds and new motorways.
TC will cover about 1.3m trucks which do about 23b veh-km/year. At an average toll of 11c/km (E0.11) the system should gross $2.5b/year. That's about a third of the gross of the whole US toll industry. The toll system levies tolls per kilometer at rates between 9c and 14c (based in cents per Euro, similar to USc) depending on rated weight and whether 4 or more axles.
Multimode
Toll Collect collects tolls almost every way except at a regular toll plaza stuck across the road. For those unequipped with any special in-vehicle gadgetry it provides for payment via the internet or at terminals with touch pads. Internet payment registers the user and requires that the toll be paid in advance by electronic funds transfer from a bank account or by credit card. Toll payment terminals are similar in appearance to automatic teller machines and similar in function except that they take money rather dispense it. Located at roadside fuel stations, truck stops, and borderposts about 1200 payment terminals are now operational and some 3000 are due to be installed. (Numbers have been scaled down. An earlier publication said 3500.) At a payment terminal the trucker enters their route, details of their vehicle including their number plate, pays with bills and coins or credit or bank card, and receives a printed receipt. The trip goes on a central computer 'white list' of paid trips along with those who have paid on the internet.
The toll payment terminals are supplied by Hoeft Wessel AG, a Hanover-based ticket vending machine company. They report sales of $85m (E87m) to Toll Collect.
Enforcement is conducted through about 300 over-the-road gantries which are equipped with video equipment that picks out trucks by profiling, sends a DSRC signal to the OBU to ensure it is working. If there is no working OBU the system takes several digital pictures of the vehicle from which license numbers are extracted by optical character recognition protocols, or in default, an official at a monitor with zooms and filters.
The 300 gantries can't cover all links in the autobahn system which has some 2300 interchanges and hence a similar number of separate roadway stretches. The 2000-odd links not covered by gantries will rely for enforcement on mobile patrols. Some 540 enforcement staff of the federal Office of Freight (BAG) will man some 300 vehicles with police powers to pull a truck over for a suspected toll violation. The enforcement vans use an IR communications system supplied by Efkon of Austria - a 1Mbit/sec dedicated short range wireless communications system
Grundig has supplied most of the On Board Units (OBU) which use GPS (satellite based Geographic Positioning System) automatic position finding manufactured by Navigant in New Zealand to a Rockwell Conexant design. By reference to digital map files (GIS) it establishes whether the truck is on a tollable road. The OBU then uses a French Wavecom GSM wireless unit for uploading toll due data.
The toll contract was fiercely contested. A rival consortium named AGES Maut consisting of major road service companies, Shell oil, Vodafone and some banks challenged the Toll Collect contract in the courts. They lost the case.
Thomas Kallweit of FELA GmbH, which designed the truck toll system for Switzerland
wrote:"The German system in particular will be very interesting to watch as it will be the first to rely primarily on GPS for calculating motorway tolling fees... There is no proven GPS-based tolling equipment on the market today, and operators face a challenge in handling all upcoming exceptions that will arise when dealing with 1.5 million installed units. Even very rare exceptions and errors will quickly multiply to a substantial number of problems."
BACKGROUND: Contrary to common opinion in the US European countries have developed extensive motorway networks. Germany's 12k km autobahn network, the largest in Europe compares with freeway/expressway km of TX 7.1k, CA 6.1k, NY 3.9k, IL 3.6k, FL 3.1k, WA 1.7k, VA 1.3k. Total US tollroads 7.9k.
Germany is seeing major changes in distribution. Its excellent autobahn network is encouraging considerable centralization of warehousing in huge automated trucking centers. The west coast of the US has some of this on the I-5 around Stockton CA, the east coast on the NJ Turnpike midway between NYC and Philadelphia, Britain on M1 in the Luton-Milton Keynes. In Germany previously remote Bad Hersfelt at the intersection of the A4, A5, A7 northwest of Frankfurt in the center of the united Germany is the scene of major truck-based logistics for deliveries all over the country and even into neighboring countries from the one facility.
FACTOIDS:
• 12,000km (c7,500mi) of autobahn and 1.4m trucks being tolled
• GPS or satellite based location finding the primary toll mechanism
• 3,000 touchpad terminals, internet and call centers the secondary toll payment modes
• 300 gantries with vehicle detection and profiling to distinguish trucks, antennas to interrogate vehicle OBUs and OCR cameras to obtain truck license plate numbers, DSRC readers for transponder equipped trucks
• 300 enforcement vans driving the autobahns for filling enforcement gaps left by the limited gantry system
• 500k OBUs by year's end?
CONTACTS: www.daimlerchryslerservices.com/mobility and www.toll-collect.de Englischesprechers look for union jack.
LATEST: August 27 TC announced its system was fully operational and that truckers can test it out by firing up their OBUs and logging on, or by booking trips manually at terminals or on the internet and get toll tickets printed out. OBUs will now begin locating trucks and recording trips taken, and compute tolls due, as if tolling were in effect.
"Shipping companies and drivers can now test the system under normal operating conditions, and take their time to familiarize themselves with the new technology," TC said in a statement on their website.
TC announced it is deploying 150 support teams to be present at the busiest terminal locations to answer questions by truckers, and help them learn the system. It said 200k OBUs have now been manufactured and it expects that will rise to 600k by Nov 2. As of end-Aug 70k OBUs are actually installed in trucks with installation rates lagging in August since the 2-month delay was announced.
2,800 terminals are installed at fuel stations and truck stops, almost the full 3,000 promised. Enforcement gantries complete with equipment will number 120 by end-August out of an initially planned 300. TRnews 2003-08-30
