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Gauging broader impacts of road pricing
ROAD pricing is often seen as a way to ease traffic congestion and trim back vehicle pollution. But plans by the Netherlands to introduce Europe's first countrywide pricing scheme seem likely to have a far wider impact on Dutch life.
The government of the Netherlands is hoping to have its "Anders Betalen voor Mobiliteit" (Paying differently for mobility) scheme fully operational by 2016. Then, probably with the help of Europe's fledgling satellite navigation system, eight million registered vehicles across 134,000 km of road will be tracked and charged for the number of kilometres they drive.
But while the government says it wants the tariff to cost motorists no more than the "fixed car and road taxes" it will replace, there is now clear evidence that road pricing on such a scale will affect everything from urban planning to road safety.
In fact SWOV - the Netherlands' Institute for Road Safety Research - believes that depending on the way road pricing prompts a switch to other transport modes, the future crash rate could differ by many percentage points. At the same time, Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis believes countrywide road pricing will totally change existing patterns of "accessibility". Travel costs will be measured differently with shopping areas in towns and cities becoming "more" or "less" attractive. * The bureau is now launching an investigation.
SWOV says it is worried that so far no one has taken into account road safety effects and is pressing for a detailed investigation. "It is certainly possible that an incorrect type of road pricing will cause a mobility shift to groups with a higher to a very much higher crash rate: for example, from cars to motorcycles or from motorways to secondary roads," SWOV said in a position paper. The road safety institute believes that with the right design, road pricing can actually bring considerable safety benefits.
For example, SWOV has calculated that road pricing will result in cars being driven 7% to 17% less. However, that decrease cannot be used to accurately calculate the safety impact because seat occupancy rates are likely to change too.
Nonetheless, SWOV still calculates that there will be up to 13% fewer road deaths on Dutch roads as a direct result of the "considerable" decline in kilometres travelled that road pricing will bring.
The scan also showed:
Bus monitors
Today buses only carry passengers but European researchers believe the time is ripe to give them an additional role as "mobile sensing platforms" that can provide "live" information for traffic control and provide early warning of road hazards. Although most major cities already use fixed video systems to monitor traffic, tests using the bus-mounted mobile system have apparently proved a "useful supplement". For example buses equipped with the sensors are able to identify vehicles that stray onto "bus only" lanes and immediately send the details, complete with photo evidence, to police. The Europeans also fitted their test buses with humidity and temperature sensors that provide early warning of foggy or icy conditions and not only alert the bus driver but broadcast the warning to other buses on the network as well as central traffic control. The video system that alerts police of lane infringements will also count vehicles in lanes around the bus and provides instant warning of local traffic build-up. "Our project worked on a large number of allied technologies, and perfected them to the point where they could be economically incorporated into bus design, but that is just the beginning of what these systems could do," said Patrice Simon, co-ordinator for the EU-funded MORYNE project. "For example, we worked on video capture, and transmission in real-time and simultaneous recording could help improve security for bus drivers and passengers. The devices are quite small but very powerful, and we could develop software that could analyse images to detect if a fight breaks out on the bus, for example, and automatically alert the police."
Oversized freight
New technology designed to create a driverless car may end up as a tool in road management. It was originally perfected by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, but at a cost of $27,000 it has been found far too expensive to be made standard equipment in today's private cars. Nevertheless, project manager Dr Hartmut Surmann believes the technology could be used both to map aspects of road visibility and to create 3-D maps to determine the best routes for trucks carrying oversized loads. The technology itself has at its core a three-dimensional laser scanner that is able to distinguish, at speeds of up to 36 km/h, streets from footpaths, parking lots, houses and pedestrians and steer a car around all obstacles. Dr Surmann says he sees two alternative applications other than creating the driverless car. One would be as an aid to the advertising industry to determine the true roadside visibility of billboards. The second would be to use the technology to help decide the best routes for trucking oversized freight. "The 3-D laser scanners can help determine how much space a transporter has, where street lights are in the way, which bridges are too low and which tunnels are too narrow," Dr Surmann says. "While digital street maps do exist, they provide no information about available space. By driving the transport route beforehand in a car that is equipped with a laser scanner, it is easy to create an exact model of the surroundings."
Shipping movements
Much road freight traffic is carried in 20ft and 40ft shipping containers and the ebb and flow of container movements is usually dictated by the ships that carry the containers to port. Now one of the world's largest shipbuilding companies, South Korea's STX Shipbuilding Co Ltd is about to change the equation - by almost doubling the maximum size of containerships. Normally such developments take time to reach Australia. For example, when an earlier generation of super-sized containerships were built, they were first introduced on the Europe-Far East run and it was years before such ships were seen trading to Australia. But what is different this time is fuel costs. STX is promoting its new containerships on the basis that the amount of fuel they will save relative to today's containerships, will reduce the price of sea freighting a container halfway around the globe by 40%. With oil prices continuing to climb and increasing attention being paid to the amount of CO2 generated by the world's shipping fleet, a switch to the new STX standard might come faster than expected. So how big are these new containerships? Each one will carry 22,000 TEUs (Twenty-foot equivalent units) versus the 13,500 TEUs now carried by the world's current largest containership. The new ship itself will be 460 metres long, 60 metres wide and 30 metres deep - giving it a deck area about the size of four soccer fields.
Cost benefits
Research by Monash University has shown that construction projects to fix safety problems on road black spots can be highly effective in saving lives and reducing the road toll. It has just analysed the impact of 800 black spot projects on Victorian roads between 2000 and 2004 and found they prevented 200 deaths and 3000 serious injuries.
