Distance-based road pricing ‘more equitable’

SINGAPORE — The new satellite-based road pricing system could mean the authorities can move more quickly to respond to changes in travel patterns to ease congestion, said transport experts whom TODAY spoke to.

While much would depend on the final proposal chosen by the Government, the experts felt a system that could spell out which roads would cost more to travel on would be fairer and better than the current zone-based system marked by Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantries.

Giving motorists more real-time information about which roads are most congested could also help change their driving behaviour, they said.

“You are charging by a distance-based (method) rather than by entry, so it’s a fairer system ... It is also giving more information to motorists, so it’s definitely better than the current system,” said Associate Professor Gopinath Menon, who teaches transportation engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

Dr Park Byung Joon, UniSIM’s head of programme for Urban Transport Management, said with the current system, there is no incentive for drivers to avoid congested roads in an ERP zone that they have entered, because they have paid the fare. Imposing charges on individual roads would be a better way of nudging them to switch routes, he said.

However, Assoc Prof Menon pointed out that whether motorists would avoid more heavily used roads would be contingent on how the charges are set and how high they are.

Dr Alexander Erath from the Future Cities Laboratory at the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability said the new system could allow pricing to become “dynamic” and based on real-time information, according to the road congestion level at a particular moment.

In comparison, current ERP rates are reviewed every three months based on the average congestion in a particular zone, he added.

Indeed, a “temporary ERP”, said Dr Park, could be created for only a few days or weeks by programming the system’s software, when special events take place.

Whether the Off-Peak Car (OPC) scheme — in which motorists pay less for Certificates of Entitlement, but pay a flat fee of S$20 a day when they use their vehicles during restricted hours — will still be relevant remains a question.

Dr Erath said OPC drivers could have more flexibility in future. Noting that some roads are not congested during restricted hours, he said OPC drivers could be charged more than non-OPC drivers when they use a congested road, instead of paying the flat fee.

NTU transport economist Walter Theseira said the new system opens up opportunities for application developers to deliver value-added services to the public, such as integrating navigation or notifying people of special deals within their vicinity.

“It might not be something that will come out when the system starts, but I think it’s something that will definitely become a feature in a while,” he said.

Dr Erath added that, ultimately, it was a question of how much flexibility drivers are willing to accept — such as a system in which costs may fluctuate day by day, therefore driving them to adjust their routes on a daily basis.

“That, for me, is still an open question — how far can you go without annoying the motorists too much,” he said.