Automatic vehicle identification and its application to inter-urban road pricing

In May 1992 the DART-Tag Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) system was launched at Dartford River Crossing for the nonstop cashless collection of tolls. This was the first full working system of electronic cashless toll collection in the UK and currently has in excess of 23000 users. The French manufacturer CSEE Peage, along with their UK subsidiary RTI Systems Ltd, saw their second major UK AVI toll collection system (FAST-Tag) launched in December 1992 at the Mersey Tunnels. It currently has over 13000 users. This paper discusses the requirements for remote identification systems and explains why microwave based techniques are best suited to AVI. A detailed description of DART-Tag follows, covering its lane equipment, computer system and associated real-time distributed database technology. Finally, recent developments in the application of AVI to a European inter-urban road pricing scheme are summarised.<>