Environmental Care : City Toll Systems

The project assumed a Road Pricing scheme is to be implemented in a major city, and will then offer support as to which scheme will yield the most benefit to that particular city. (exemplified for Copenhagen).
In short, the objective of this project is to construct a tool (hereafter referred to as 'the Tool'). This incorporates the development of a methodology which allows the comparison of economical and ecological effects of a road pricing scheme. The tool that can be used to evaluate a set of different Road Pricing schemes based on various parameters and then answer the following three questions: from a customer’s point of view:
1.What Road Pricing scheme will yield the best results for the city?
2.What are the effects of the Road Pricing schemes compared to a given situation (which could be the current situation? or a situation in future)?
3.What are the answers to the above two questions in a near future scenario? (2 to 5 years)?

The Tool will answer the above three questions with KPI’s within the areas pollution, revenue and traffic. Pollution will primarily be measured by airborne pollutants (incl. CO2 and particulate matter). Revenue will be the income from road users' payments to the Road Pricing scheme minus the cost of establishing and maintaining the scheme. Traffic will be primarily measured by average spped and congestion.

A future scenario is defined by the input parameters. As such there is no limit as to how far into the future the tool can be used, but the results are of course dependent on the accuracy of the input.
The Tool will initially be able to evaluate three different Road Pricing schemes:
1.Distance based Road Pricing where the pricing is a function of the distance driven within a zone. In this case the Road Pricing scheme is based on GPS in possible combination with a secondary technology for enforcement such as camera or RFID.
2.Fixed zone based Road Pricing where there is a fixed price for entering a zone. The technology here can be GPS, RFID, camera or another stationary technology.
3.Flexible zone based Road Pricing where the price for entering a zone is dependent on the time of day the zone is entered. Technology can be as in (2), but additional displays informing of the price might be needed.

The baseline scenario that will be used when evaluating the above three Road Pricing schemes will be the KPI’s from running the Tool with a no pricing strategy.

The results showed that a mixed base pricing (mixed by 1 and 2 above) provides the best results in terms of increased average speed and less congestion as well as in terms of reduction of CO2 emissions (4.5% reduction)and human health impacts in the inner city.