'Honey, have you paid the driving bill?'

By Jennifer Pritchett

When Toronto-based inventor Bern Grush misread a street sign and was given a parking ticket in the city's busy downtown core back in 2002, he fumed over both the complexities and inefficiencies of the system.

"There has to be a better way," he recalls thinking at the time.

There wasn't, so he set out to invent one, and in the process he created wide-ranging applications for the transportation sector including pay-as-you-drive road pricing, which is garnering attention from cities around the world.

His idea has become the driving force behind Skymeter Corp., an upstart technology firm that has developed smart meter devices that use global positioning system technology to pinpoint the exact location of vehicles.

Roughly the size of an eyeglasses case, the little black box sits on the dashboard and records the vehicle's movements and can be tracked by a monitoring system.

The emerging technology has been tested by several jurisdictions, including the Department of Transportation in California and the City of Seoul to meter road travel and charge fees to motorists as a way to reduce traffic gridlock and cut pollution.

Kamal Hassan, Skymeter's chief executive officer, said that while the now-eight-person company started out by trying to come up with a way to avoid parking tickets, the technology has other applications, including pay-as-you-drive insurance.

"We're in the metering business," he said simply.

Just as meters are used to measure electricity and water as a means of charging users, Mr. Hassan said the Skymeter device provides the pricing mechanism to treat road usage and parking as utilities. The pay-as-you-drive system allows governments to charge motorists for individual use of roads instead of paying for infrastructure through taxes, which largely hides the actual cost to the taxpayer, he maintains.

Mr. Hassan adds that drivers shouldn't put up with parking shortages and traffic delays when they typically don't line up for other commodities. If people had to pay for using specific roads they rely upon, he said, fewer cars would be on the road. People would car-pool more often, opt for public transit, walk, ride bicycles or even relocate closer to their workplaces.

So far, the Skymeter technology is available only in Winnipeg, where the municipality's parking authority is testing it. The new system is expected to be implemented citywide by the fall of 2010, making it the first jurisdiction in the world to use the park-and-walk-away Skymeter.

Dave Hill, the Winnipeg parking authority's chief operating officer, was keen to try Skymeter. "I just think it's so cool," he said. "We're always trying to make this easier for people. I'm excited about the concept."

Here's how it will work: motorists will buy a Skymeter device for an as-yet-undetermined price; then they will establish an online profile so they can be billed remotely. Once they activate the device, it will read signals from a satellite. When a vehicle stops in a parking spot, it will register the location and begin to meter the parking time. The customer will then receive a bill at the end of the month.

The city is testing four devices and is planning a more complex pilot project with 100 vehicles. "We want to try it in different weather so that we can test them in a cold car," Mr. Hill said. (The pilot project will include on-street meters. Longer-stay parking for more than two hours will be allowed in those areas where municipal bylaws permit.)

Prior to the Winnipeg pilot project, Skymeter joined in 2008 with Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, a strategy-consulting branch of Cisco Korea, to create a transportation project in Seoul.

The pay-as-you-drive plan was born out of Cisco's commitment to former U.S. president Bill Clinton's global initiative to reduce carbon emissions. But it was put on hold after the Seoul metropolitan government changed and politicians grew concerned about the possibility of drivers' complaints.

Cisco's Tony Kim, who heads the Seoul initiative, said that while early tests of the new transportation framework proved to be successful, "city executive officials came to a conclusion that it would be good to implement the solution for pay-as-you-drive tax or insurance gradually."

Mr. Kim hopes the Skymeter technology will soon be implemented in Korea.

Road pricing has also gained support in the United States. Amid nationwide calls to refurbish aging infrastructure, a federal commission last February called for a cross-country pay-as-you-drive system that would rely on GPS satellite technology similar to Skymeter's.

However, in Canada, Skymeter technology may be a tough sell. User fees on roads will have dire consequences for the auto industry, says analyst Dennis DesRosiers of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants Inc.

"These kinds of technologies make [transportation] more efficient, I don't deny that, but if governments collectively want to protect the 900,000 to one million jobs in the automotive industry, they also have to accept that we need more vehicles, not less ... I'm against road pricing," he said. "We need consumers to drive more, not less."

A better approach to solving traffic problems, he maintains, would for governments to invest more, not less, in roads.

While the road-toll debate continues in North America, Skymeter has signed an agreement with NXP, a former division of Philips electronics based in Europe, to develop road pricing and other vehicle-related forms of mobile payment in the Netherlands and France.

The company is now looking for investors who believe that Mr. Hassan is on the right road when he says: "Imagine leaving home to drive to work and never encountering a traffic jam and always having an available parking spot."

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CONTROLLING CONGESTION

These cities have used technology to impose fees to control congestion and pollution:

Milan

System: The Ecopass program is a traffic pollution charge introduced in January of 2008 for some motorists travelling within a traffic-restricted zone of downtown Milan.

Technology: Cameras at gates monitor vehicles.

Why: Primary goal is to reduce pollution. Cost: Fees depend on individual vehicle's energy emissions and range from 2 to 10 euros ($3.13 to $15.66) on weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Effect: Emissions have been cut by 14 per cent.

Stockholm

System: First introduced as a trial between Jan. 3 and July 31, 2006, the Stockholm Congestion Charge is a traffic and environmental tax. A referendum on its future was held in September of 2006 and residents voted yes.

Technology: Vehicles pass through control points and are identified by licence plate recognition using cameras and lasers. Why: Income from fees will be used to partly fund a bypass road in Stockholm.

Cost: Fees vary from 2 to 6 euros ($3.13 to $9.39), depending on what time of day vehicles enter the zone.

Effect: Traffic congestion has dropped by about one quarter and emissions have been reduced by roughly 14 per cent.

Source: BBC, The Times