Over the past years in Europe a number of large scale, - i.e. nationwide – free flow multilane electronic fee collection (EFC) schemes for heavy goods vehicles (HGV’s) have been announced, planned, re-planned, tendered, recalled, re-tendered, procured, implemented successfully or rather unsuccessfully, on time or with (sometimes significant) delays, with complete or only rudimental functionality. From the viewpoint of an EFC Senior Consultant, who has seen projects failing, almost crashing – quite rarely – succeeding from behind the scenes, non-technical reasons for failure are related to the procurement process as well as to the legal backing and background of the EFC scheme envisaged. This paper tells the lessons learned from various European projects (Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, ..) and introduces a legal model of how to overcome the related legal issues. It continues a series of presentations held at the ITS WorldCongress 2008 in New York and other international events, dealing with the lessons learned during the deployment of nationwide EFC schemes in Europe. Now focus is put on the legal aspects, as these are – besides technicalchallenges – the most important success factors before, during and after EFC Scheme implementation.
Abstract