Toll Collect GmbH is a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 company that has developed and is running the tolling system for trucks (LKW-Maut

LKW-MAUT

Germany's LKW-Maut is a toll for goods vehicles based on the distance driven in kilometres, the number of axles and the emission category of the vehicle.-Overview:...

) on German motorways.

The company is a consortium led by Daimler AG, Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom AG is a telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is the largest telecommunications company in Europe....

, and Cofiroute. It has won a bid for the development of a toll billing system from the German government. The development of the system started in September 2002. The technology is based on the Global Positioning System

Global Positioning System

The Global Positioning System is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites...

, and a web application for booking truck routes in advance. Trucks are equipped with embedded systems called "On Board Units" (OBUs). OBUs are used for positioning, monitoring and billing. Additionally the OBUs have infrared

Infrared

Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, measured from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.74 micrometres , and extending conventionally to 300 µm...

 interfaces for communicating with stationary control bridges on the motorways.

Since the end of 2002 several hundred engineers and programmers worked on the project. Articles report more than 1000 experts were involved in the project. The rollout was first scheduled for the end of August 2003, but was delayed repeatedly, causing the government to forfeit toll collection on trucks using the Autobahn. The deadline was first shifted by 2 months, then by at least one year. There have been, and still are, considerable disputes between Toll Collect and the German government about damages to be paid by Toll Collect to the Government because of the long delay in the deployment of the system. There were also accusations that during the tender process for the system, non-German companies were not given fair consideration.

The system was opened two years behind schedule on January 1, 2005.
The charge per kilometre varies according to the number of axles and the vehicle's emission category and is between 9 and 14 cents per kilometre. This means, that the road tax for e.g. a Hamburg-Munich-trip (776 km) costs between €69.84 and €108.64. It is payable at toll booths if they do not have electronic units that permit automatic billing.

External links

• Official Website of Toll Collect
• article on opening
• Road tolls: How will it affect the modal split? Master thesis written by Carlos Braga and Magnus Källgren about Toll Collect and its possible results