Imagine THIS as the future of driving?

Imagine that every time you drove into the heart of your city's downtown you had to pay a small fee. How would traffic be affected if that fee shifted predictably by time-of-day depending on the congestion in the city center? This is one of the ideas that UC Berkeley researchers hope to test drive in a new international center dedicated to the future of urban transportation policy and technology. The Volvo Research and Educational Foundations recently awarded $2.4 million over five years to the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation to establish this Centre of Excellence.

London, England, instituted a fee for entering downtown London -- the complexity of enforcing, collecting and managing the fees has to be weighed against the benefits to congestion (as yet, undecided) from levying the fee.

Engineers at U.C. Berkeley are looking not just at a fee but a "time of day" fee as the next natural step in improving traffic flow.

In the picture on the right, the six large circles on the road are data collectors monitoring the speed and density of traffic. Based on this data, fees for access to the freeway will be set. Just how variable the fees will be is part of the research (can they change real time? NOTICE: the fee for road use is now ... $10 ... may elicit mass exit use: "GET OFF! GET OFF! Next exit, get off! We can't afford this now -- the fee just went up.").