Achieve road efficiency at minimal privacy risk

Satellite tracking of highway movement will enable road pricing that could eventually help optimize traffic flows. So a good shield for personal data should be a road-safety priority

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India’s adoption of radio frequency ID tags for auto-deduct payments of highway tolls, made a must in early 2021 by the government under its FASTag system, eased traffic bottlenecks at toll plazas across the country. Checkpoint scanners now read stickers on windshields, charge vehicles the listed rate, and lift boom barriers, allowing faster passage than the manual process did. Given the density of our traffic, toll snarls still persist on busy routes, but the wait would have been worse without this automation. What it took away, however, was pricing flexibility at the booth level. So bargains could no longer be struck for partial road use. Whatever the ethics of cash discounts, adjustable road pricing had both market demand and moral justification: a road user in need of only a short stretch to reach a village should not have to pay for going all the way to a far-off destination. Charges calibrated by one’s actual use are not just possible to introduce, but also the key promise of our next proposed technology upgrade. As the ministry of road transport and highways has