Zone, gantry or per mile (or km) charges that you can collect.

How Skymeter Works for Road Pricing:

Design your tolling scheme, distribute meters, receive billing information and send bills. That's it.

Skymeter enables virtually any type of road pricing scheme you can imagine. If you find your pricing plan isn't working, move boundaries or switch plans at the stroke of a pen. Zone pricing, virtual gantries or pure mile/km-based TDP (time, distance, place) pricing: Skymeter does it all. Skymeter is also fully interoperable, either physically (read by gates) or contractually, with existing tolling systems.

The Benefits of Skymeter

Skymeter deals with the shortfalls of existing gantry-based and other GPS tolling systems. It does not require the installation of expensive, limiting, fixed road-side gantries. It also offers accurate transactions, is easy to install, has full privacy protection and offers metering as a service. Contrast this to the courtroom challenges, system rework and revenue losses non-financial GPS systems have experienced, just on highway charging. Skymeter's Financial Grade GPS metering service has even been shown to price accurately in the dense urban canyons of Seoul.

The biggest political handicaps to road charging today are concerns over privacy and fairness. Skymeter offers full privacy protection. Fairness can be addressed by suitable road pricing policies. Skymeter provides many options for charging, so that fairer plans can be designed.

Enforcement and 'Guest Passes'

Any metering system needs to supported by optional payment methods, and a good enforcement system, for drivers without meters. Skymeter meters can be rented by the day, and installed in a couple of minutes, by visitors to a city. Otherwise, drivers may need to prepay a flat fee per hour (or day) of driving, by paying online, by phone or in a service station. Enforcement can be done extremely cost-effectively, by a combination of fixed and mobile enforcement. Fixed license-plate recognition cameras can be strategically placed on key access points (e.g., highway exits). Remaining enforcement can then be done by mobile enforcement cameras or vehicles, in a similar manner to speeding enforcement.

Types of Road Pricing Policies Enabled

With Skymeter, pricing policies can change by time, distance, place, vehicle type and even driver behavior. You can:

• price for entering or leaving a zone
• price with a series of virtual gantries
• price per mile (or km) by class of road
• vary that price by time of day
• offer credits to drivers who stay parked during rush hour
• vary that price by type of vehicle
• vary that price by the driver's place of residence

For instance, a city could charge $4.00 to enter and $0.20 per mile driven downtown during rush hour. Those who arrive at work before 8:00 or after 10:00, then park all day and drive home later than 6:00 pm could be refunded the entry charge. Electric cars could pay only $0.10 per mile. City residents, who pay municipal taxes, could pay only $0.05 per mile or be given a refundable $100 driving credit each month.

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