Parking fees, charges and Austrian tolls...
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Success in Austria and congestion charging in Bristol. Chris Tindall rounds up this year's Freight Transport Association Summit.
The Freight Transport Association's annual Freight Summit provided an ideal opportunity for Sergio Battiboia to explain just how successful Austria's toll system for trucks has been.
The operations manager for Europass. the company responsible for rolling out the electronic fee collection system, was clearly proud of the apparent ease with which the toll charge was introduced on 1 January. When compared to the embarrassing failure of Toll Collect to achieve something similar across the border in Germany, you can see why.
Battiboia says Austrian's model is very simple and relics on microwave technology. He says its success can also be put down to ensuring 170,000 on-board units (OBUS) were available for operators when the scheme was launched (the units are mandatory in all vehicles over 3.5 tonnes). Meanwhile,"Road Sheriffs" patrol the roads as mobile enforcement units. He believes the violation rate is just 1.81)/0.