In my wrap up remarks to the Summit on “The Future of Tolling: ORT and the Path to Interoperability” in Tampa, I identified “control” as one of the underlying themes. Many speakers and conference attendees expressed concern about how much (or how little) control they would have over their own future.
Here are just a few of the many control-oriented questions I heard during the Tampa conference. “If charging on the basis of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) becomes pervasive, what will happen to my toll agency? Will there even be a toll industry? The world seems to be moving rapidly to VMT charging; therefore, IBTTA needs to own this issue. What happens to my agency if the industry moves to a new standard for ETC equipment and systems? Will we still be able to use the equipment we have now, or will we be forced to move to a new platform? At my agency, will we continue to own the customer accounts? Or will someone else like the banks or the credit card companies gain control? Who controls the Alliance for Toll Interoperability (ATI)? What is IBTTA’s role in that?”
I mentioned the commencement address delivered by Paul Hawken to the class of 2009 at the University of Portland in which he urged his listeners to focus less on control and more on connection. He said to the graduates:
You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force.
So, when I sat in our conference in Tampa and listened to people talk about control and ownership and force, what I heard was fear. Fear of change, fear of the unfamiliar, fear of being swept away by an idea or practice that was “not invented here.” In other words, if somebody else thought of it, I don’t want any part of it.
This revulsion to the unfamiliar is perhaps an evolutionary development. It was (and perhaps still is) a survival mechanism. If I don’t know you, I stay away from you (and your ideas) because you could be a danger to me and my survival. I think what Paul Hawken suggests, however, is that our survival depends on connection. Our survival and our prosperity depend on connecting and combining a diverse set of people, ideas, practices, and beliefs for the betterment of humanity. I think we in the toll industry can profit from Hawken’s ideas in our quest to promote the concept of tolling AND find the path to interoperability.
While all of this was swimming in my head today, I heard on the radio a commentary by Daniel Schorr in which he described how the Internet is helping to advance freedom in Iran. Here’s a brief excerpt:
The "Twitter Revolution," some call it. In Iran, tyranny has run afoul of technology in the form of the Internet, turning a protest into a movement. Iran has now become the latest arena in the struggle for control in cyberspace. The Internet has effectively defeated the regime's efforts to isolate marchers from each other and from the outside world. The Internet has become a veritable underground social network. A dedicated Twitter account for supporters of challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi claims to have more than 11,000 followers. The Twitter company in San Francisco expresses pride that it is playing an important part in Iran as a communications tool.
So, all over the world we see that connection, not control, is the wave of the future. Connection, not control is the way in which humanity is continuing to evolve and strive for freedom. Just as our small experiment in Twitter at the Tampa meeting helped to connect attendees in four separate breakout sessions in real time, so Twitter is nurturing the aspirations for connectedness among the people in Iran. I hope that our own efforts at connection (not control) will help us find the promised land of interoperability in the toll industry.
-- Pat Jones
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
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Tolling is a complex concept, hard to freeze in time and space. Even though VMT as a concept will eventually prevail this does not mean that all the current tolling projects must be unified under a single solution and by means of a single technology. Urban, rural, freight, passengers, intertwined or not with the mobility network and systems, these concepts show how it would be difficult (or possible only at the cost of much of its effectiveness) to devise and implement a one-size-fits-all VMT or tolling system. VMT as a concept can be implemented in various modes, and at various costs, according to the necessities, the maturity and the inclinations of Regions and Countries; VMT can accomodate distance based tolling, area based tolling, trucks only tolling, congestion based tolling, and each of the applications could require specific technologies.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting feature of the European approach to tolling interoperability is the acceptance of the concept that the European interoperable tolling has to accept the local solutions in terms of toll calculation, enforcement and, to a certain extent, also technology.
As Clarke and Kubrick put it in "2001 a space odyssey" evolution takes steps, and the perfection of the black monolith is very distant in space and in time, if ever achievable.
Current tolling projects are the very basis from which the future can start, they cannot be neglected of canceled, if they put themselves in the center of the stage and they lead the evolution, rather than fall victims of the evolution.