Great post! Decentralization of this kind has tons of upside, political and operational among others. The voluntary participation aspect I think is particularly beneficial, ensuring solutions meet the needs on the ground and can be more easily adapted for various local contexts (while filtering out the ideas that end up not working well …
Great post! Decentralization of this kind has tons of upside, political and operational among others. The voluntary participation aspect I think is particularly beneficial, ensuring solutions meet the needs on the ground and can be more easily adapted for various local contexts (while filtering out the ideas that end up not working well in practice). Seems to be better than the current top-down approach from the federal level for certain types of benefits, though not all.
The biggest and most obvious challenges that come to mind are related to financing, particularly when it comes to developing the initial infrastructure (who foots the bill for something early/experimental?). I'm sure there are models out there currently in use that could be adapted for this type of development, I'm just not familiar with them & applicability to public-benefit projects.
Yes, great point! I think the financing question really depends on the specific use case. For electronic tolling, I suspect that tolling agencies would have had pay to set up all that infrastructure anyway (e.g. the toll readers, IT infrastructure, call centers, PR campaigns) regardless of whether it's interoperable with other systems.
So if an agency is just moving to electronic toll collection at the same time as they're joining E-ZPass, I suspect they would be spending roughly the same amount of money, just that they'll get more value out of it due to interoperability. Which is great!
On the other hand, if a state already set up their electronic tolling system, then I imagine switching to E-ZPass could involve some transition costs, both in the infrastructure and in switching branding. How big, I'm not sure. But I imagine that's probably a contributor to why some other states haven't joined yet, as there are several other electronic tolling systems out there (e.g. California's FasTrak, Texas's TxTag).
Great post! Decentralization of this kind has tons of upside, political and operational among others. The voluntary participation aspect I think is particularly beneficial, ensuring solutions meet the needs on the ground and can be more easily adapted for various local contexts (while filtering out the ideas that end up not working well in practice). Seems to be better than the current top-down approach from the federal level for certain types of benefits, though not all.
The biggest and most obvious challenges that come to mind are related to financing, particularly when it comes to developing the initial infrastructure (who foots the bill for something early/experimental?). I'm sure there are models out there currently in use that could be adapted for this type of development, I'm just not familiar with them & applicability to public-benefit projects.
Yes, great point! I think the financing question really depends on the specific use case. For electronic tolling, I suspect that tolling agencies would have had pay to set up all that infrastructure anyway (e.g. the toll readers, IT infrastructure, call centers, PR campaigns) regardless of whether it's interoperable with other systems.
So if an agency is just moving to electronic toll collection at the same time as they're joining E-ZPass, I suspect they would be spending roughly the same amount of money, just that they'll get more value out of it due to interoperability. Which is great!
On the other hand, if a state already set up their electronic tolling system, then I imagine switching to E-ZPass could involve some transition costs, both in the infrastructure and in switching branding. How big, I'm not sure. But I imagine that's probably a contributor to why some other states haven't joined yet, as there are several other electronic tolling systems out there (e.g. California's FasTrak, Texas's TxTag).