Singapore adopts in-vehicle GPS tech to manage road tolls

After becoming the first city in the world to implement congestion pricing in 1975, Singapore has consistently worked to improve and upgrade its road pricing systems and technology. Writing in Bloomberg CityLab, David Zipper explains how the city's latest overhaul of its tolling system will use GPS to manage tolling.

According to Zipper, "ERP 2.0 is the first system of its kind in the world, and it offers an early picture of ways that satellites could change how governments collect vehicle data, mitigate gridlock, and share real-time information with drivers. It also opens the door to a longstanding dream of transportation reformers: distance-based road pricing."

It remains to be seen whether Singapore residents will accept the satellite-based system, but the city's transit authority "has no immediate plans to deploy one of ERP 2.0’s most powerful capabilities: charging tolls based on a vehicle’s actual trips taken, rather than the passage of toll points, which would more precisely link fees to the slowdowns that an individual driver imposes on others. Although this functionality was foundational to ERP 2.0’s design, officials have stayed mum about implementing it."

However, officials expect that the data collected by the new system will help them estimate roadway speeds and how infrastructure impacts them.