The contents included in this section are DRAFTS proposed for a public consultation and are under review.
Scenario
The European Electronic Tolling Service (EETS) ensures interoperability of tolling services across the entire European Union road network. EETS enables road users to easily pay tolls throughout the whole EU with only one subscription contract with one service provider and a single on-board unit (OBU). By limiting cash transactions at tolling stations, and eliminating cumbersome procedures for occasional users, EETS facilitates daily operations for road users, improves traffic flow and reduces congestion.
It also helps to further incorporate road transport into the wider information society, as the EETS on-board equipment functionalities can be used by various other added-value telematic applications and services, such as eCall, real-time traffic and travel information.
A single contract with one EETS Provider should allow EETS Users to pay their tolls in all EETS domains of the European road network, in accordance with Article 3(1) of Directive 2004/52/EC.
This Directive set scopes and standards to be used in the Electronic Tolling Free System (ETF) and it was followed by another important policy document issued by the EC in the form of the Commission Decision of 6 October 2009 on the definition of the European Electronic Toll Service and its technical elements.
Both of these policy documents are reviewed, with the last consultation ending on October 10th, 2016. The scope and contents of this review are available on the official documentation.
More information on the consultation follow up and its evaluation about the documents above and the scope of the revision are available at the following link, extracted “as is” from the link above:
- the roadmap to the ex-post evaluation of the EETS legislation
- the inception impact assessment for the revision of the EETS legislation, once published, it will be made available on the official website.
Toll chargers operate either on behalf of the Member State, or in the framework of a concession contract with the Member State, managing the infrastructure or levying the tolls for the circulation of vehicles on the network they manage.
We distinguish two different situations:
- Levy tolls with an OBU mainly implemented using:
o DSRC (short range communications);
o GNSS (satellite);
- Levy tolls without OBU, where no equipment is needed and is usually implemented by automated number plate recognition (ANPR).
EETS procurement requires technologies and solutions from different aspects: toll collection; enforcement (i.e. verifying compliance of road users with respect to the charging schemes); processing of all data in a central system for invoicing; and/or customer relationship and assistance solutions.
Selecting between those technologies and solutions imposes significant cost effects (§5.1.3). Procurers may want to avoid being locked into a specific vendor or solution as technologies rapidly advance and/or become obsolete (e.g. communication protocols used in tolling) and infrastructures need to be maintained (§5.1.6.1).
Interoperability issues may arise between different solutions, including those thatmay be implemented within the same country (§5.1.6.2), and there is the need for solutions to account for (and comply to) personal data regulations is essential (§5.1.7.2). These are all needs requiring dedicated provisions in procurement tenders.
This website provides an informed view on the current knowledge in those areas.
In October 2015 the EC study State of the Art of Electronic Road Tolling was released which presents a useful cost analysis on EETS, focussing on costs benchmarking associated to specific toll domains. Of particular value is the cost comparison between GNSS and DSRC based EETS Systems.
The whole study is available here.
The same study above at the §5.1.3, in its WP1 State of the Art in Europe, shows an analysis of the distance-based tolling schemes for heavy vehicles in Europe, other than a list of selected case studies.
Standards
The following contents are the starting sources for the list of standards reported in the excel spreadsheet that can be downloaded at the this page.
The Annex III of Commission Decision 2009/750/EC lays down the essential requirements for EETS for Toll Chargers’ fixed and mobile roadside equipment
The CEN - EN 15509 standards, acknowledge these requirements: more information about this standard are available here.
Within Italy, Toll Chargers’ fixed and mobile roadside equipment may support instead ETSI ES 200674-1 and its related Technical Reports for protocol implementation. More information about this standard are available at the ETSI website, and the whole standard is available here.
Use Cases
Three cases are relevant for tolling systems definition:
Use Case 1: Levy tolls with On-Board Unit (OBU) based on DSRC
Use Case 2: Levy tolls with OBU based on GNSS
Use Case 3: Levy tolls based on ANPR
For key references and details, see:
- Technology options for the European Electronic Toll Service - by Directorate General for Internal Policies - Policy Department B: Structural and Cohesion Policies, Transport and Tourism, 2014
Guidelines
Summary of vendor lock-in issues:
- An issue to keep in mind for contracts between toll chargers and member States based on on-board unit technologies (DSRC/GNSS) is the fact that equipment is usually owned by the contractor. The contract should include provisions for transfer of service and data (no known existing guidelines so far).
- Standardisation is poor for the communication between the back-office interfaces and the EETS providers and toll chargers, but there are some recommendations to avoid vendor lock-in.
The main guidelines on interoperability, and other issues related to the Electronic Road Toll Systems, have been published by the EC in 2011 in its Guide for the application of the Directive on the Interoperability of Electronic Road Toll Systems (ISBN 978-92-79-18637-0) that is available here. Chapter 4 (Assessment of EETS Interoperability Constituents) defines requirements and procedures for verifying the System compliance to requirements other than the specifications. As such this document specifies the standards, technical specifications, and other normative requirements that could be relevant for an EETS System.
About the technology choice, if 500,000 vehicles have to be tolled in less than 2,500 tolling segments then DSRC technology is, at the moment, the most cost-effective technology to apply. Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) provide communications between a vehicle and the roadside in specific locations, for example toll plazas.
If the tolling segments number rises until ca. 5.000, with the same number of vehicles, the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) technology becomes the more convenient technology to apply.
Lifecycle Costs (LCC) are often underestimated, and are not always included as one of the assessment criteria when determining the total cost when awarding a tender for EETS components/services. Nevertheless, the EC Procurement Directive enables the awarding of public contracts on the basis of the most economically advantageous tender (Article 82 of Directive 2014/25/EU), and as such the whole LLC should be inserted in the awarding criteria.
Horizontals
Strategic Procurement
One aspect of the procurement to consider is the regulatory context to promote green, social and innovative procurement.
The Directive 2014/25/EU on procurement by entities operating in the water, energy, transport and postal services sectors, calls for “the best strategic use of public procurement to spur innovation. Buying innovative products, works and services plays a key role in improving the efficiency and quality of public services while addressing major societal challenges” (Recital 57).
Its Article 99 provides also a reporting mechanism “The Commission may, not more than every three years, request Member States to provide information on the practical implementation of national strategic procurement policies”.
At this proposal, the EC published in the Official Journal of the European Communities a specific Communication related to the “Community law applicable to public procurement and the possibilities for integrating environmental considerations into public procurement”, available here.
Other than this Communication, the EC published the Buying Social - A Guide to Taking Account of Social Considerations in Public Procurement .
More information are available at the EC Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) website.
The Commission Decision of 6 October 2009 on the definition of the European Electronic Toll Service and its technical elements states as follows:
The introduction of EETS will entail the processing of personal data which shall be carried out in strict accordance with relevant Community rules, as set out, inter alia, in Directive 95/46/EC (on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data) of the European Parliament and of the Council and Directive 2002/58/EC ( concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector - Directive on privacy and electronic communications) of the European Parliament and of the Council.
Other indications could be taken from guidelines and studies concerning the possibility to include geolocalisation data in the wide set of personal data that are subject to the GDPR.
For the Use Cases listed in the §5.1.5.1, the security framework that should be applied is the CEN TS 16702-1 “ Electronic fee collection - Secure monitoring for autonomous toll systems - Part 1: Compliance checking ” e CEN TS 16702-2 “ Electronic fee collection - Secure monitoring for autonomous toll systems - Part 2: Trusted recorder ”
