Properly Manage Revenue Leakage When Shifting from Manual to All-Electronic Road Tolling Systems.
Interviews with Tolling Industry Experts Documented Best Practices for Implementing Road Tolling Systems in the United States.
General USA Data, United States
Tolling Lessons Learned for Road Usage Charge
Summary Information
As an alternative to motor fuel taxes, many U.S. states have recently launched pilot projects or full-scale Road-Usage Charge (RUC) programs to generate transportation funding. To reduce high implementation costs deployers have considered ways to leverage potential synergies between RUC and existing road tolling and vehicle-level pricing programs. This study aimed to identify commonalities between tolling and RUC by conducting nine semi-structured interviews with experts from tolling programs across the U.S. between July and October 2022. The interview results were used to develop a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework to help states evaluate readiness to implement RUC pilot programs.
- Properly manage revenue leakage and when shifting from manual to all-electronic road tolling systems. To prevent revenue leakage (i.e., revenue losses from violations payment system defects) this study recommended a “pay now” model where users can be charged a certain amount of money based on their expected usage of the roadway.
- Consider moving towards an open-road tolling system with all-electronic tolling technologies. This study found that an open-road tolling system would improve accuracy in capturing transactions, reduce the need for physical infrastructure, open up road space, and reduce the need for collecting cash payments, which is a high operational expense.
- Adopt technology that would reduce as much manual labor and technical error as possible. For example, such technology could include promoting the adoption of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transponders by road users to reduce operational costs to the agencies.
- Standardize data access and improve data quality in collaboration with other tolling agencies. This could be especially important in terms of data privacy when integrating RUC with tolling, specifically, when tolling agencies handle transactions that require linking vehicles’ license plates to the owners via the Department of Motor Vehicles.
- Look into ways of bringing down administrative costs. As mentioned in this study, a proposed solution was to integrate RUC into annual vehicle inspections processes to streamline the mileage data collection and reduce administrative and collection costs.
