Achieve road efficiency at minimal privacy risk
India’s adoption of radio frequency ID tags for auto-deduct payments of highway tolls, made a must in early 2021 by the government under its FASTag system, eased traffic bottlenecks at toll plazas across the country. Checkpoint scanners now read stickers on windshields, charge vehicles the listed rate, and lift boom barriers, allowing faster passage than the manual process did. Given the density of our traffic, toll snarls still persist on busy routes, but the wait would have been worse without this automation.
What it took away, however, was pricing flexibility at the booth level. So bargains could no longer be struck for partial road use. Whatever the ethics of cash discounts, adjustable road pricing had both market demand and moral justification: a road user in need of only a short stretch to reach a village should not have to pay for going all the way to a far-off destination.
Charges calibrated by one’s actual use are not just possible to introduce, but also the key promise of our next proposed technology upgrade. As the ministry of road transport and highways has said, this year will see the country implement a toll collection system that uses satellite GPS tracking. With eyes in the sky on vehicles, plaza snarls would end and road prices will be paid only for the distance covered.
Among the project’s hold-ups are questions of what it would imply for the privacy of road users. At one level, apprehensions relate to cyber-security exposure. The current system uses special wallets that need to be refilled with money online.
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