Ministers back variable technology for road pricing

28 July 2008
 
The Government has underlined the ‘very significant risks’ involved in delivering national road-user charging, but suggested that technologies allowing variable charges would be useful for local authorities.

The Department for Transport has again said a national road-user charge is at least a decade away, and it would instead focus on alternatives to increasing capacity, including hard shoulder running, car-sharing lanes, and widening, where justified.

But the DfT will commission a charging technologies demonstration project, which Rosie Winterton, minister for local and regional transport, said ‘could support urban schemes, possibly over a wider area than to date’.

The department has invited companies to propose how they would run an effective system which calculates charges, depending on the time of day and route chosen. The two-year study will assess ‘that the technologies work accurately and reliably’.

Ministers have stressed that 80% of England’s congestion is in urban areas.

On the national road network, it would consider tolled lanes ‘to offer motorists the choice of a more reliable journey’. But there was ‘a great deal of work to be done’ in taking forward the idea for implementation. The UK motorway carriageway was ‘too narrow to have bulky physical separation’, as in the US, so such a scheme would require markings to designate the special lanes.

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