Going with the flow

How to keep inner city traffic moving is a problem that has plagued authorities for decades. Can congestion charging provide the answer? MENA Infrastructure looks at three case studies to find out.

Traffic congestion is the blight of the modern urban environment. The age of the automobile has put an incredible strain on cities whose road systems were often laid out long before the arrival of the motor vehicle. As traffic volumes have grown, the arteries of the average city have become increasingly clogged, and far from being a potent symbol of personal freedom, the car has become a prison for many commuters. Many attempts have been made to ameliorate the situation, from improved traffic control systems to the promotion of public transport. But the allure of the private vehicle is such that these efforts have failed to stem their flow into city centres.

It is this reality that has led to a mounting interest in congestion charging. The thinking goes that if drivers are forced to pay every time they enter a city, they will do so less. A journey carried out at a time when demand is high and capacity limited costs more than a journey carried out when there is low demand and high capacity. In addition, money raised by the schemes can be funnelled into improvements in traffic systems and better public transport, further easing the burden on urban roads.

Stockholm represents one of the most recent implementations and is probably the city able to demonstrate the most compelling positive effects of the congestion charging system. The success was so notable that in a referendum following six months of trial operation, the citizens of Stockholm voted in favour of keeping the congestion tax system – probably the first time in history a population has voted in favour of a tax. Ingemar Skogö, Director General of the Swedish Road Administration, is clear that any controversy over the move has been well worth it. “We have a positive experience from our road charging experiment in Stockholm City, where we have undertaken a fully automatic congestion tax in the city centre,” he says. “Our experience is that the congestion has decreased by approximately 10 percent, and acceptance from the public is, overall, positive.”

In London, a congestion charging scheme has been in operation since 2003. Though there have been some predictable teething problems, the scheme is now demonstrating a reasonable level of maturity. “We’ve made hundreds of changes to the way that the scheme works since it was first introduced,” says Graeme Craig, Director of Congestion Charging and Traffic Enforcement at Transport for London. “There was and still is no automated payment system, so drivers have to remember to pay when they drive in the zone. Sometimes they forget and end up getting a fine. So back in 2006 we gave drivers an extra day to pay the charge.” Next on the menu is a fully automated payment system that should eliminate the risks of driver forgetfulness.

Central to the London plans has been the fact that all money raised by charges and fines for non-payment is pumped back into improving the city’s transport infrastructure. As the scheme raised a net figure of UK£137 million last year, Craig believes the benefits go well beyond simply reducing the number of vehicles on the roads. “Particularly we’ve improved the bus network,” he says. “We’ve also made it easier and safer to walk around and cycle around London. One of the impacts the congestion charging scheme has had is we’ve actually seen a 66 percent increase in the number of people cycling into London, which obviously is a good news story.”

Given its well-publicised traffic issues, it isn’t surprising that Dubai is now pursuing its own congestion charge scheme. The Salik project has introduced tollgates at some of the Emirate’s worst traffic blackspots and is the first such system in the region. According to Mattar Al Tayer, Chairman of the board and Executive Director of the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority the system is already proving to be a success. “Our studies before and after introducing the Salik have revealed that it has been a success and helped a great deal in easing traffic congestion on the Salik routes,” he says. Backing this statement up with personal experience, he adds that his journey from home to office, previously a 75-minute trip, has now shrunk to just a quarter of an hour.

Steinar Furan of traffic system provider Q-Free lauds Dubai’s move in adopting a road pricing strategy, but adds that it is only part of a total solution to tackle traffic congestion. “The Dubai RTA has been very brave and foresighted when deciding to implement the first tolling system in the region,” he says. “It is important to understand that RTA’s intentions with SALIK has always been to use it as a part of a broad plan within ITS and traffic management in the emirate. We are now seeing public transport coming into effect, such as the high-speed train and buses. Where there are alternatives to the private vehicle, the SALIK system can prove itself invaluable.”

From a technology perspective, Q-Free recommends using automated number plate recognition (ANPR) combined with dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) in a multilane free flow environment. Furan cites the Sheikh Zayed Road as a prime example of the problems facing transport planners. “This is a highway where on a daily basis you will see speeding vehicles, stop’n go traffic, six lanes of congested but flowing traffic and so on,” he explains. “In our view, the only tolling system that is able to fully cope with this situation is a full-fledged multilane system. Several such systems are currently operational in Europe, among those the Stockholm Congestion Tax System, where ANPR is the primary mean of identification and DSRC is used for cross border interoperability. A top performing system is crucial for any government that wants to use it as an important tool in their management plan for the future.”

As populations increase and the number of vehicles on the roads continues to grow, we can expect to see more and more congestion charge implementations. They may not always be popular with the drivers who have to foot the bill, but it is increasingly clear that they are a necessary evil. If the economic heartbeat of cities like Dubai is to remain strong, it is essential that their circulatory systems can flow freely.

Stockholm syndrome
Stockholm started off with a very clearly formulated policy: the purpose of the congestion charging system was to improve the environment through reducing the number of vehicles in the inner city. To implement the policy, the city of Stockholm decided to carry out a set of well-defined actions:

1. The charging system should set a price for the use of road services in the inner city that varied according to the ratio demand/capacity: the higher the demand, the higher the price. Thus, the price was also set to zero at times where demand for road services was low.
2. The city realized that the transportation work carried out was done as a result of a need for transportation services. Making travel expensive at some times of the day did not eliminate the fact that people needed mobility. The answer to that was to improve the public transport services significantly so that the traveller had a real choice: go by car and pay the tax, or travel on a decent public transport service.
3. The city understood that a key success factor was getting information to the public. A congestion charging system affects all inhabitants, young and old, and ensuring that everyone understands the basic principles and how to interact with the rules of the system is crucial for its ability to work as intended. Stockholm carried out an extensive information programme prior to the launch of the congestion tax, ensuring that all inhabitants understood that driving during rush hours would be charged but that new and improved public transport services were available.
4. The system’s operation had to be flawless so that citizens experienced the system as available, reliable and fair. To secure this, Stockholm awarded (as a result of a public tendering process) the main contract to build and operate the system to IBM with Q-Free as the key supplier of road user charging technology.

The technology chosen for the purpose of identifying vehicles in the Stockholm Congestion Tax System is automatic number plate recognition, applied in a so-called Multilane Free Flow configuration. This means that the control posts, the ‘toll plazas’ of the system, do not comprise any physical infrastructure in the lanes – in fact, there are no lanes from the perspective that the system allows the vehicle to be located at any lateral position of the road. The roadside infrastructure comprises of an advanced detection system and coordination system together with Q-Free cameras equipped with Q-Free’s Intrada ALPR software engines on both the roadside and the backoffice. In short, this means that any car that crosses into the charging zone is automatically detected and the number plate of the vehicle is automatically read and decoded by the camera. This in turn is used by the central system to determine the tax liability for each car owner. The processing capacity of the camera is higher than the road’s capacity for handling vehicles, meaning that the cameras send out decoded number plate strings and corresponding photos of the plate itself in real-time.

In the Stockholm Congestion Tax System, Q-Free’s ANPR solution reads more than 96 percent of all vehicle images automatically with an error rate of less than 0,001 percent. Correct identification requires that both the registration number and state code are read correctly, which is a truly challenging task as neighbouring countries have plates with similar syntax and fonts. In a combination with the system’s business logic, this means that all drivers are charged correctly and that only a minute fraction of the system’s 400,000 daily images need manual attention. In fact, the Stockholm Congestion Tax System is the world’s only system where a car owner is charged solely on the basis of an automated machine reading with no human intervention. In turn, this means that operational costs can be kept at much lower levels than would be the case for a system with manual inspection.

Focus: London
Upon its introduction in 2003 London’s congestion charging system was the largest ever implemented by a capital city. To say that is was welcomed by all inhabitants would not be true, but few could argue with its immediate results; on its first day traffic levels decreased by an impressive 25 percent. Critics argue that the scheme’s launch during the school holidays accounts for a great deal of this success, and debates about the scheme persist to this day. Critics of the charge argue that it has harmed businesses and unfairly penalises those residents that live at the boundaries of the congestion charge zone. Nonetheless, a Transport for London report on the first six months of the charge stated that the number of vehicles entering the congestion zone was 60,000 less than the previous year and the zone was extended west in 2007. However, the new mayor of London Boris Johnson has promised to scrap the western extension by 2010, after 67 percent of respondents to a public consultation voted against it. In London at least, congestion charging seems to have a way to go before it achieves total public acceptance.

Focus: Dubai
Though Dubai’s Salik project became operational a month before its Swedish counterpart, it remains a work in progress. Beginning with tollgates on Al Garhoud Bridge and at Barsha on Shaikh Zayed Road, further gates were added in 2008 on Al Maktoum Bridge and Shaikh Zayed Road between the First and Second Interchanges. Though this implementation is dwarfed by those in Stockholm and London, the conditions it seeks to address are every bit as pressing to the Emirate’s road users. Dubai’s infrastructure has struggled to keep up with its rapid expansion, turning the daily rush hour into a virtual gridlock. The Salik tollgates only form part of Dubai’s overall strategy to ease traffic congestion. A new metro system, more public buses and marine transport aims to change Dubai’s reputation as a place where public transport is the poor relation to the private car. Current usage rates for public transportation sit at around six percent. A massive media campaign is planned to encourage its use by visitors and residents, with a target to increase this rate to 30 percent once the new metro and buses are launched in September 2009.