Last week saw the start of a number of important trials for Galileo applications in the road transport sector…
Tracking trial starts
Last week saw the start of a number of important trials for Galileo applications in the road transport sector.
These trials are taking place in Spain and Italy and are meant to demonstrate the multiple applications that an ‘on board unit’ (OBU) can bring.
The areas that are being investigated include:
- Electronic fee collection & road charging
- Pay per use insurance
- Traffic info generation using floating car data & provision
- Livestock tracking
- Urban fleet monitoring
I think that the electronic fee and road charging trial will be watched with interest by various organisations within the UK as this will ultimately be the way we are all charged for road access.
As I mentioned in my blog on the 21 May currently OBU’s can’t yet be relied upon for congestion charging but the expectation is that Galileo will change all this.
When motorists are charged based on location information there needs to be a very high level of accuracy. If you can imagine driving for five meters into the London congestion charging zone which would then become a chargeable journey (except in the future if you are in a 120 or below CO2 vehicle, see last week’s blog ) so accuracy needs to be in centimetres rather than meters.
I suspect that this type of trial will also lead onto others on Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) which will take over our driving if we are going to have an accident. In this case the need for location accuracy becomes life or death rather than just getting a large fine from TfL.
Now that will be interesting won’t it?
