Singapore just put a satellite in your dashboard...will other countries do the same?
Firstly, welcome to our 60th edition! For this one we thought we would touch on what four countries are doing with charging and changes in technology. Enjoy!
Singapore
Singapore has been charging drivers to use busy roads since 1975 - even longer than I have been alive - the first city in the world to do it.
This year it went further: physical toll gantries are being replaced with GPS units wired into every vehicle, tracking location by satellite instead of a camera on a gantry.
Officials built the system with the ability to charge by distance travelled, not just by gantry crossed, then went quiet on whether they'll switch it on.
One thought: Once you can price a road by the metre instead of by the gantry, you can price every road...politically it's questioned whether a government would, but the ability is there nonetheless.
New Zealand (Auckland)
Travelling back to New Zealand, Auckland's version of this is clunkier but coming from the same place.
Council signed off three congestion charging options on 25 August: $2 to $7 a trip depending on the option, with $5 the number actually going out for public feedback in November.
It only touches 3 to 7 percent of trips, but for us transport planners we know this is the point: it is this slice of traffic causing most of the delay.
Congestion costs Auckland's economy $2.6 billion a year and 29 million hours of people's lives.
Full rollout isn't expected until 2030 or 2031, so pace your response accordingly!
UAE (Dubai)
Travelling to the Middle East we see Dubai is considering the same...the difference, which we say tongue in cheek, is that they didn't bother consulting anyone. They didn't need too.
Salik tolls went up to AED 6 at peak (about NZ$2.70) from 31 January, two new gates went in on Al Khail Road and Sheikh Zayed Road, and the transport authority is projecting up to 42 percent less congestion as a result.
That number is doing a lot of work for one sentence and I'd want to see it again in twelve months, but the direction is clear: Dubai treats road pricing as an engineering dial, not a political negotiation. Sort of refreshing!
Australia
Australia, my homeland, is the cautionary tale.
Victoria tried an EV road-user charge in 2021, got taken to the High Court, and lost in 2023, the whole scheme ruled unconstitutional.
NSW is having another go, targeting 2027.
Meanwhile the federal government is handing out $1.95 billion in fringe benefits tax breaks to get people into EVs in the first place, which funded roughly 330,000 of them.
From our view, one arm of government is paying people to buy the cars that are eroding the fuel excise, while another arm tries to charge those same people to drive them, and a third arm just got told by a court it isn't allowed to.
A coordinated National response could be an option? However, a federal nationwide charge has reportedly been shelved while they work out how to stop repeating Victoria's mistake.
Four countries, four completely different appetites for the same problem: Singapore going quietly technical, Auckland going slowly and consultatively, Dubai going fast and unapologetic, Australia potentially doing circle work before it finds the right direction.
The lesson for anyone building one of these schemes isn't the technology, gantries and satellites both work fine.
It's that the boring bits, who's exempt, where the money goes, whether it survives a High Court challenge, are what decide whether the thing outlives its launch week.
Til next time
Andrew
P.S We have just finished running the National Pentathlon champs on the weekend here in NZL. which is five disciplines (in our case we had six as keep the history of our sport with horse riding alive and well) that only count if they're scored the same way for everyone. Road pricing has the same problem at a much bigger scale, except the field is an entire city and some competitors didn't agree to enter!
Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.
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