Allocation procedure for truck tolls in Germany

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This article deals with the award procedure for truck tolls in Germany .

Overview

  • Beginning of 1994, the Telekom subsidiary DeTeMobil together with the French company SAGEM on a Press Briefing a "system for automatic toll collection by GSM - mobile communications technology " before. A few weeks later, the Federal Ministry of Transport started planning a field experiment on the A 555 between the cities of Cologne and Bonn . The tests began in 1994 and were carried out by TÜV Rheinland . The results were rated as “satisfactory” and the system of mobile motorway tolls as “stable and practicable”.
  • In November 1995, the then Transport Minister Matthias Wissmann ( CDU ) announced the introduction of a route-based truck toll.
  • In October 1998 the red-green federal government decided on a toll-financed anti-traffic jam program.
  • On November 7, 1998, Federal Transport Minister Franz Müntefering ( SPD ) announced that he would enforce a route-based truck toll by 2002. The transport ministers of all federal states welcomed the project unanimously. The toll system and its technical infrastructure should be financed, installed and operated by a private company.
  • In September 1999, Müntefering set up the government commission “Transport Infrastructure Financing”, also known as the Pällmann commission after its head Wilhelm Pällmann (1982–1991 on the board of DB , retired in 1995) .
  • In January 2000 the award procedure began as a negotiated procedure with an upstream participation competition .
  • In September 2000, the Pällmann Commission proposed a route-dependent toll instead of the previous vignette - the planned fee: 25 pfennigs (14 cents) per kilometer of motorway. Transport minister was Reinhard Klektiven (SPD) at this time , the tender for the truck toll was already in full swing, the planned start date was January 1st, 2003.
  • On August 15, 2001, the Federal Cabinet decided to introduce a truck toll on German motorways. The amount of the toll is graded according to the number of axles and pollutant emissions and should be between 14 and 19 cents per kilometer.
  • On April 12, 2002, the law on the introduction of route-related fees for the use of federal motorways with heavy commercial vehicles (Federal Law Gazette I, No. 23, p. 1234) came into force. It was the legal basis for the introduction of the truck toll and was replaced by the Federal Trunk Road Toll Act on July 19, 2011 .
  • In July 2002 the bidding group ETC.de (Electronic Toll Collect; later Toll Collect ) prevailed over competing consortia in the controversial award procedure.

The individual providers

  • The bidding consortium ETC.de (from March 2002 Toll Collect , Berlin) consisted of Deutsche Telekom , Daimler Chrysler Services ( debis ) AG and Compagnie Financiere et Industrielle des Autoroutes ( Cofiroute S. A.), France . Their concept provided for an on-board unit (OBU) for each vehicle , which determines the position via GPS and exchanges the data with the central computer via GSM .
  • The bidding consortium AGES Maut System GmbH & Co. KG (Düsseldorf) consisted of Mannesmann AG, Aral AG & Co. KG, Bundeszentralgenossenschaft Straßenverkehr e. G., DKV Euro Service GmbH & Co. KG, euroShell Deutschland GmbH, Trading Company for Motor Vehicle Requirement GmbH & Co. KG and UTA Union Tank Eckstein GmbH & Co. KG. She had been in charge of the time-based toll vignette system that was in force in Germany until August 31, 2003 for heavy goods vehicles with a gross vehicle weight of 12 t or more. Their concept also envisaged a GPS-supported recording, in which the data exchange should, however, take place via GPRS .
  • Fela Management AG (Dissenhofen / Switzerland) and ThyssenKrupp AG belonged to the third bidding consortium . Fela Management AG had supplied and developed fee collection devices for the performance-based heavy vehicle charge ( LSVA ). Their concept provided for a transponder for each vehicle, which transmits the individual vehicle identification via DSRC technology to toll bridges, which are set up between all connection points. Compared to the GPS-based concepts, there would have been higher infrastructure costs for the toll bridges, but the vehicle-related costs and operating costs should be lower.
  • Another concept from Heinrich Schüssler, inventor and managing director of TSR traffic management systems , was only submitted in autumn 2001. It should achieve annual savings of € 500 million compared to the solution from ETC.de. Since the concept was not received on time, the Federal Ministry of Transport did not take it into account. The red-green majority in the Bundestag budget committee rejected an assignment to the Federal Audit Office for an audit .

Award procedure

The tender for the truck toll was drawn up by the working group for the truck toll advisory group (BLM). The Cologne-based TÜV InterTraffic GmbH (a subsidiary of TÜV Rheinland ) and the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers were responsible for the IT technology. Fee costs of EUR 15.6 million were incurred for external advice.

The procedure was designed as a negotiation procedure with an upstream participation competition, according to § 3a No. 1 Paragraph 4 Letter c in conjunction with § 3a No. 1 Paragraph 3 Clause 2 VOL / A. Only the first, general part of the tender was public and was published in December 1999 in the Federal Bulletin and in January 2000 in the supplement to the Official Journal of the European Communities.

After the deadline for submission, February 17, 2000, 6 companies and groups of companies had submitted an application to participate in the procedure. Five of these consortia were asked to submit an offer by January 31, 2001. These 5 applicants received confidential documents with the details of the advertisement, which are kept secret until today.

Three providers submitted bids on time; Siemens AG and Gedas (telematics subsidiary of Volkswagen AG ) are said to have been among the other potential providers .

May 2001: Exclusion of Fela AG

On May 14, 2001, the Ministry of Transport excluded Fela Management AG from the proceedings because the financing of the project was no longer secured after ThyssenKrupp left the consortium. The funding was a prerequisite for building the system and paying potential contractual penalties. Fela Management AG criticized the reasoning as incomprehensible, since large banks were behind their concept.

On June 29, 2001, an application to review this decision was filed with the Federal Cartel Office. This was rejected as inadmissible on July 25, 2001 for formal reasons (VK2-20 / 01), because Fela had submitted a complaint against the exclusion to the registry 3 days too late.

August 2001: Exclusion and resumption of AGES

On August 17, 2001, AGES was informed of the exclusion from the award procedure because there was no evidence of sufficient financial resources. That left only ETC.de as an applicant.

On August 29, 2001, AGES applied for a review procedure with the Federal Cartel Office, which was rejected as unfounded on October 18, 2001 (VK2-32 / 01). At the beginning of November 2001, AGES called the award senate at the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court , which ruled on December 21, 2001 in the last instance that the exclusion had been wrongly carried out and that the proceedings were being reset to the status of August 17, 2001.

The start of the truck toll on January 1, 2003, which was still planned at the time, could no longer be kept.

September 2002: Decision for Toll Collect, cooperation with Ages

On July 1, 2002, the start date planned for January 1, 2003 was postponed by half a year.

On June 10, 2002, the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing announced that the contract for the truck toll system should be negotiated with the bidding consortium ETC.de (since March 2002 Toll Collect ). ETC was considered the "preferred bidder". On July 8, 2002, the ministry finally decided on Toll Collect.

The Ages consortium was defeated because it had calculated the cost of the on-board units (OBU) and toll terminals to be considerably higher than Toll Collect and the bid was several hundred million euros above their offer.

Ages again submitted a review application to the Federal Cartel Office and thus prevented the Federal Ministry of Transport from awarding Toll Collect. Ages criticized the award procedure and questioned the efficiency of the Toll Collect offer.

The application was rejected on September 4, 2002 by the second public procurement tribunal. Ages lodged a complaint with the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court, which was granted on September 19, 2002. This decision had a suspensive effect and again prevented the awarding of the toll contract to Toll Collect.

Ages withdrew his complaint the next day because Toll Collect was planning to "incorporate certain business services from Ages Maut System GmbH & Co KG into the implementation of the new dual toll system based on the expertise and expertise of the current manual system" . Ages will thus also participate in the development of the toll system. Klaus Mangold , CEO of DaimlerChrysler Services , spoke of a share of less than 20% and denied that Toll Collect had been blackmailed by Ages with the legal dispute.

Due to the delays, the start date, which had already been postponed to July 1, 2003, could no longer be kept.

Criticism of the award procedure

As early as 2001, critics were of the opinion that the outcome of the proceedings had already been determined. ETC.de should emerge as the winner in order to support the market value of Telekom.

After the exclusion of his company, the managing director of Fela Management AG, Ernst Uhlmann, declared that it had taken part in the tender at the express insistence of the Federal Ministry of Transport. Critics speculated that the medium-sized Fela Management AG had never been seriously considered as an operator and only served as a "counting candidate" in order to increase the number of providers.

The use of external employees in German federal ministries is repeatedly criticized. Exactly at the time when the award procedure was taking place, Dr. Heinrich Osterloh employed in the Federal Ministry of Transport. Dr. Osterloh, however, from DaimlerChrysler , where he was head of the corporate strategy and transport policy department at the time. DaimlerChrysler was just one of the groups that were part of the operator consortium that ultimately received the billions in the order for the truck toll. There is suspicion that Dr. Osterloh passed on information from the ministry to his employer

It is also criticized that the Federal Ministry of Transport needed 15.6 million euros for external consultants before the introduction and 7.8 million euros for the "Advisory Group on Truck Tolls (BLM)".

Other critics expressed that politicians prefer a satellite-based system in order to create fields of activity for the planned European satellite project Galileo . In 2003 the EU Commission tried to prescribe a satellite-based system for a future EU-wide truck toll from 2012.

It was also criticized that the toll system should not only serve to collect tolls, but was also intended as an industrial policy and technology promotion. In “Facts on the truck toll, 2003-2004” from the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing , this goal was described as follows: With the largely automatic collection of truck tolls, Germany is becoming a technological pioneer in Europe and worldwide. This opens up new market opportunities for industry and secures jobs. The world's first implementation of such a system can also trigger an innovation boost in other fields of information technology in Germany. Critics compared this to the development of the later failed Transrapid .

As a worst-case scenario an experts' assessment were called in case of technical failure damages of 4.8 billion euros.

Signing the contract

The contract between the Federal Ministry of Transport and Toll Collect was signed on September 20, 2002, two days before the federal election. The city ​​of Zug in Switzerland was not chosen as the location for signing and certification , without this being made public. Federal Minister of Transport at that time was Kurt Bodewig (SPD).

August 31, 2003 was set as the start date. In retrospect, the set interim dates (milestones) became known:

  • May 21, 2003: The system should be in place
  • June 15, 2003: Function should be checked
  • Mid-August 2003: Trial operation should start

Toll Collect was unable to meet any of these deadlines.

confidentiality

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The contract details are kept secret and are not even accessible to the members of the German Bundestag . The application by Jörg Tauss (Member of the Bundestag, then SPD) at the beginning of 2006 to inspect the contract with reference to the Freedom of Information Act was rejected. The Ministry of Transport refused to create a version that had been cleared of Toll Collect's trade secrets "for lack of expertise".

Criticism of the Toll Collect toll system

Control bridge on the A 81

In addition to the criticism of the award procedure and contracts, the technology of the Toll Collect toll system is also criticized.

  • Jammers or GPS jammers could disrupt or sabotage the secure metering of charges.
  • In the first stage of the introduction of the toll (by January 1, 2006), the saved toll coordinates of the OBU-1 could not be changed. As a result, it is not possible to include federal and country roads that are polluted by “toll refugees” in the toll system.
  • At the beginning of June 2004 it became known that the tariff information was not set up variably and could, for example, be transmitted to the devices by radio. To change the fee, it is necessary to remove all OBUs in the workshop with the following reprogramming.

In 1999 , in the run-up to the truck toll in Austria , ASFINAG commissioned Rapp AG (Basel / Switzerland) for an appraisal . It comes to the conclusion that a GPS / GSM toll system has no advantages, but serious disadvantages and problems. This would primarily lie in the process of the overall system such as the control, the treatment of vehicles without an OBU or a recording that is not transparent for the user and legal questions. The report names the following potential defects in a GPS toll system:

  • An OBU obligation cannot be enforced because of the high costs. Vehicles without an OBU can be unrecognized on long stretches of road.
  • Because of the OBU costs, the system cannot easily be expanded to include cars.
  • The simple shadowing of the GPS antenna interrupts the secure recording of charges.
  • The outcome of legal disputes over GPS-based billing is completely open, as there are no precedents worldwide.
  • Individual control bridges can only check payment selectively, but not for the entire distance driven.
  • Possible data protection requirements can prohibit the storage of a route so that only route sections with control bridges would be calculated.
  • Due to the OCR error rate, the control bridges only recognize around 80% of the license plates of vehicles without an OBU.
  • Owners and data of foreign vehicles without an OBU cannot be determined retrospectively.

The failure of the 2003 toll introduction

On the set start date, August 31, 2003, the recording of the fee could not begin because numerous problems with the construction of the system existed and continue to exist.

Transport Minister Manfred Stolpe set November 2, 2003 as the new date , until then a non-chargeable test phase should take place. However, this date was canceled as part of a crisis summit organized by the Federal Minister of Transport with representatives from industry on October 5, 2003 in Berlin. The introduction of the system was thus postponed indefinitely.

At the beginning of November 2003, a spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Transport spoke of 86 known errors in the toll system. They were not published, but a number of problems and errors are known:

  • Delivery bottlenecks and malfunctions of the on-board units , the core of the billing system.
  • Not all measuring bridges were completed on time.
  • There are not yet enough machines, so-called toll station terminals, available for manual log-in.
  • The toll terminals crashed due to software errors .
  • Too few foreign languages ​​are available at the toll terminals for operation by foreign truck drivers, usually only German, English, French and Polish.
  • Difficulties in system integration , the correct interaction of all hardware and software components.

The federal government put the loss of revenue already budgeted at at least 156 million euros per month. The CDU opposition blamed Stolpe personally for the delays and called for his resignation.

Renegotiations after the failure of the first round of negotiations at the end of 2003

On December 13, 2003, negotiations between the Federal Ministry of Transport and Toll Collect failed. The spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Transport said in Berlin that Toll Collect had not given a new date for the introduction of the toll and was not prepared to compromise on the issue of revenue shortfalls. Previously, representatives from Telekom and DaimlerChrysler had spoken of a “time window for the third quarter of 2004” in press interviews.

The budget committee of the German Bundestag met on December 18, 2003. With the votes of all parliamentary groups, it was decided that the contract with Toll Collect should be terminated if no binding date for the introduction of the truck toll was given by December 31, 2003 and Toll Collect was not prepared to pay the federal government's revenue shortfall settle. Federal Transport Minister Manfred Stolpe initially announced that he would adhere to this requirement.

On December 26, 2003, however, Stolpe surprisingly extended the negotiation period with Toll Collect by a further month. The possible termination date was postponed to the end of January 2004.

On January 27, 2004, Toll Collect submitted new project plans to the Ministry of Transport. The system is to be introduced in two stages at the end of December 2004 and finally by the end of 2005. In the event of further delays, Toll Collect offers a maximum liability of a maximum of 500 million euros.

On February 15, 2004, several days of negotiations between Stolpe and the Toll Collect management failed.

On February 17, 2004, Transport Minister Manfred Stolpe announced the termination of the contract at a press conference in Berlin. This started a two-month period. The toll system was to be rewritten and the old toll vignette to be reintroduced as an interim solution two months later.

On February 29, 2004, Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announced an agreement with the shareholders of Toll Collect DaimlerChrysler and Telekom. The core of the agreements was the introduction of the truck toll with limited functionality on January 1, 2005. On January 1, 2006, the toll system should then be fully functional. The liability was capped at one billion euros, the Telekom is given more weight. Siemens is getting more involved in the project: The company is to take over responsibility for the technical project coordination of On-Board Unit 2 , which is to ensure the operation of the full version from 2006 onwards.

On March 11, 2004, it became known that the CDU would not support an FDP application to set up a Bundestag committee of inquiry into the truck toll. Since the necessary quorum of at least a quarter of the members of the Bundestag did not come about, no corresponding committee was set up.

On May 16, 2004, Toll Collect published a press release that “independent experts” had confirmed that 99.2 percent of all motorway sections were correctly recorded by the toll system. The system also works at around 6,000 entrances and exits with a detection rate of 98.9 percent.

In mid-June 2004, Toll Collect announced that a system test with 41 vehicles from May 8th to 21st had produced a certified reliability of 99.6%. On the basis of this expert opinion, the dispatch and installation of the vehicle devices (OBUs) can now begin. This message was accepted by numerous media without further examination. It is unclear how the value of 99.6% came about and which experts it was - Toll Collect refused to provide any information. Journalists suspected the "independent experts" to be in the ranks of TÜV Rheinland , which was already involved in the tender for the truck toll.

At the beginning of July 2004 a spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Transport confirmed a newspaper report that the federal government would go into arbitration negotiations with Toll Collect to claim damages amounting to 3.7 billion euros (by January 2005). Otherwise "... there is currently no reason to assume that January 1, 2005 is at risk". The chairman of the Federal Association of Freight Transport, Logistics and Disposal (BGL), Karlheinz Schmidt , saw this more critically in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung: "If I had to bet, I would guess that the toll won't come in January".

Web links

This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

Not only the contracts with Toll Collect, from September 2002 were secret. The tender documents for the toll system, which were made available to the five possible providers after February 17, 2000, were already secret.

The following documents relate to decisions in the review requests to the procurement chamber of the Federal Cartel Office in Bonn, which were submitted by the excluded bidders. They are possibly the only publicly available source of information from which conclusions can be drawn about the tender for the toll system. The pdf documents are anonymized and partially blackened (omissions). The content and those involved in the proceedings had to be researched and are indicated in the links.

Incidentally, all (3) requests for review were unsuccessful, all (2) lawsuits against these decisions before the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court were successful.

swell

  1. ↑ heise mobil ( Memento from February 14, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Bad advice is expensive ( memento of the original dated November 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 234 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cducsu.de
  3. ↑ AFP
  4. ↑ Debis threatens to fail with its toll project Computerwoche, December 14, 2001 ( Memento of August 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ ARD-plusminus ( Memento of the original from December 14, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sr-online.de
  6. ^ (Page 148 ff.) Sascha Adamek and Kim Otto: The bought state: How corporate representatives in German ministries write their own laws. 1st edition. Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-462-03977-1
  7. ^ "Paid lobbyists in federal ministries: How the government deceives the public" Monitor report of December 21, 2006
  8. ↑ German Federal Council, printed matter 684/04  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.bundesrat.de  
  9. ↑ heise.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / heise.de  
  10. ↑ mirror online
  11. ↑ Contracts for the truck toll remain a secret heise newsticker .
  12. ↑ tagesschau, "Toll increase depends on EU decision"
  13. ↑ FTD ( Memento of July 8, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ heise.de
  15. ↑ Procurement Chamber of the Federal Cartel Office in Bonn ( Memento of March 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive )