For over a century, automobiles have been the dominant form of transportation in the world. Today, with the expansive growth and development that takes place in many urban settings, traffic congestion management has become one of the biggest challenges facing the public sector.
With this growing problem the questions of government leaders and transport planners abound; How to finance growing infrastructure needs amid growing demands for mobility, shutdown and grunting? How can arterial flows be improved to accommodate changing traffic patterns and environmental concerns?
Changing the prevailing trajectory in traffic management will require a new mentality, one that requires the use of new technological advances. This presents Project Oaken, a new startup that has created an Ethereum-based platform for IoT applications. Project Oaken demonstrated a smart contract use case for automatic toll payments, using a vehicle from the well-known Tesla brand for this test.
This event highlighting the digitization of government services is part of a more expansive move to push for blockchain adoption in Dubai in collaboration with the Global Blockchain Council.
This self-toll booth concept test system proposes the replacement of the existing toll road infrastructure with a low-cost intelligent contract protocol. Current toll roads have huge server infrastructure requirements for accounting, identity and payments.
This is how the system works: The TESLA points out at the toll the desire to make a payment, which causes a smart contract transaction. This operation captures the Tesla data and transmits it to the block string in the form of an IPFS hash. The Tesla then validates the data of the blockchain transaction, comparing it with the GPS data from the tollgate smart contract. These data are stored in an IPFS that leads to a triggering of the smart contract to pay the toll on cryptoconversion. The toll then captures the toll paid signal allowing the Tesla to access the toll road.
So why is Project Oaken’s solution valuable to the future of toll management? To begin with, it allows the removal of legacy server systems that are manageable and costly to operate. In addition, it reduces the cost for users, in addition to offering instant remittances.
It is still a beginning of the direct and specific applications of smart contracts in more complex uses of interactions between a “smart” vehicle and “smart” public services. But it points to good results in the medium term.
