The aim of this project is to develop, field-trial and evaluate a dynamic road user charging system for Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs). The need for fairer and more efficient means of pricing road use through the "polluter pays" principle has prompted many governments throughout Europe and other parts of the world to investigate alternative pricing strategies for urban and inter-urban road networks. Of particular concern is the road freight sector, as HGVs cause a disproportionately high level of road pavement wear per vehicle-kilometre compared to other vehicle classes, and fixed annual taxation payment systems are highly inefficient at capturing the extemal costs of pavement wear which can vary' by pavement type, dynamic axle load, HGV class and axle configuration. In order to align better the actual costs of pavement wear and charges for road use more accurately, various distance and weight-based charging approaches have been implemented recently. For example, in Europe and the USA, Weigh-In -Motion (WIM) systems have been installed on certain roads and bridges to assist infrastructure cost recovery (for example the HELP Programme in the USA). In Sweden and Norway, HGVs pay a distance and HGV-class based charge, Australia and New Zealand operate an axle-weight-based distance charge, and in Switzerland, the recently introduced Heavy Vehicle Fee charges HGVs on the basis of actual distance travelled and gross permissible axle weights. However, the main drawbacks with extending these systems into a pan-European system for charging for actual pavement wear at the point-of-use include the likely roadside infrastructure costs and serious concerns about using measured static axle loads (as opposed to dynamic axle loads) to estimate actual pavement wear. In addition, it is argued here that these systems are not able to satisfactorily align pavement wear costs to road user charges. Therefore this paper concludes with a functional specification of an on-board charging system which seeks to overcome these drawbacks by extending state-of-the-art technologies for variable road-user charging, automatic vehicle locationing and dynamic axle-load measurement to enable HGVs to be charged a price which includes the dynamic effect of loading on structural pavement wear. It is envisaged that the evaluation of the prototype system will lead to recommendations for new approaches to allocating road track costs more efficiently and fairly between individual road-users.
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