Feasibility test of fleet telematics for road user charging
Lessons learned from previous road user charge demonstrations around the USA have revealed major hurdles including privacy and the security; add-on technology; customer complexity; program administrative costs; and scalability of deployments. For those reasons Minnesota’s most recent demonstration project took a decidedly different approach by enlisting car-share companies using the fleet embedded telematics platform as the basis for fee collections. This approach was taken because this represents a model for new vehicles that may one-day greatly simplify a road user charge fee collection system. This presentation will explore whether:
• A fleet-based approach to RUC, using embedded telematics, is accurate and reliable and may reduce administrative overhead and enforcement costs
• Embedded telematics, installed by manufacturers in most of today’s vehicles, could be used to deploy RUC more efficiently and effectively across a range of operations and ownership scenarios
• A dual revenue collection system with RUC alongside the motor fuel tax will be needed for decades