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Is Electronic Road Pricing the solution for HCM City gridlock?
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VietNamNet Bridge – Ho Chi Minh City may experiment with collecting fees automatically from cars entering the city’s centre – the so-called Electronic Road Pricing system – reports Doanh Nhan Saigon Cuoi Tuan. What’s so great about ERP?


Elsewhere, it works

“Electronic Road Pricing” or ERP is already employed by many big cities as an effective measure to control the circulation of vehicles and to curb traffic jams. It also contributes to reduce the volume of exhaust gas.

Europe led in the development of this response to persistent traffic jams caused by an explosion in automobile ownership. Britain in the early 1960’s, followed by other European cities, introduced many kinds of taxes to control the density of cars.

Not until 2002, however, did Britain set fees for access to city centres, first in Durham City and then London. The fee that a car had to pay to enter the downtown in 2003 was £5 per trip, a levy that rose to £8 in 2008.

In Norway, fees for access to downtown Oslo between six a.m. and 10 p.m date from 1986. In February 2008, Norway automated its system, now called Auto PASS.

In Sweden, toll booths are set up at the gateways of city hubs and drivers must pay fees dependent on the time they enter these zones.

In Germany, drivers pay a tax based on the tonnage of their vehicles and the pollutants they emit. For example, as of January 2005, trucks must pay €0.9 to 0.14 per kilometer travelled.

Italy uses a similar method. Vehicles that meet the Euro3 and Euro4 standards for exhaust gas are exempted from road fees but others must pay this fee, which is progressively higher proportionate to emissions. In December 2009 Italy finished a pilot programme of collecting pre-paid road fees for some zones of traffic and is moving to apply this method throughout the country.

The island country of Malta uses the most modern road fee collecting system, named Valetta CVA, which was implemented as of May 2007. This system can track the times a car goes in and out of the capital city and how long it travels within the city, then send a monthly bill to drivers. This technology was nominated for the Best European Transport Strategy Award.

Many Asian countries also have several decades’ experience using road fees to control traffic. Singapore’s Area Licensing Scheme to control the density of vehicles in its Central Business District was introduced in 1975. In 1985, the city-state’s system was automated, including ERP points, transmitters in vehicles, pre-paid cards and a central network of computers. Singapore currently has 80 ERP points. Hong Kong and Shanghai apply similar systems.


Learning from Singapore

HCM City plans to apply Singapore’s ERP system on a trial basis. This system works in the following way: drivers purchase their cards at their bank and charge their cards via ATMs; when their cars go through ERP points, fee collecting transponders on their vehicles will automatically deduct money from the cards.

If the cards don’t have enough value or cars don’t have transponders, cameras at ERP points will film the cars and send the pictures to the control centre.

This technology is said to help easily control cars. ERP systems can be fine-tuned to the requirements of any time of day.

Tran Quang Phuong, director of the HCM City Department of Transportation, said that HCM City is learning from Singapore because its ERP system works very effectively, and is credited with reducing the volume of vehicles in the Central Business District by 20 percent. There is less congestion at rush hour and more people use the public transportation system.

This solution is seen to be feasible in HCM City because investment in such an ERP system is estimated at about 2.5 trillion dong, plus 100 billion dong per year to operate it, but revenue from this system could be about 2.1 trillion dong annually.

In terms of cash, this system is really lucrative but the core objective – curbing traffic jams – may not be so easy to effect based on HCM City’s characteristics. This solution is proposed to be applied in central city Districts 1 and 3.

Actually, there are already semi-automatic fee collection points at many HCM City gateways (the Saigon, Phu My and Binh Trieu bridges and Nguyen Van Linh Street) but they haven’t reduced the flow of traffic to the city’s hub.

New measures like imposing fines based on cameras have not been effective at all, so it would be a big problem to deal with cars without fee collecting equipment or drivers whose cards don’t have enough credit. Who will solve these cases and how can they deal with them?

ERP may be a significant measure to deal with traffic jams in HCM City but it is not necessarily a panacea. If fees collected from ERP are not promptly re-invested in transportation facilities and mass transit systems, the major goal will not be achieved.

VietNamNet/DNSGCT