Oregon
This is the project that started it all.
Oregon started looking into road usage charging way back in 2001 and ran a few small proof of concept projects prior to 2012. In 2012 they decided to go for broke and start the process of launching an actual program. I worked on a business plan for Azuga to pursue a business to become a commercial account manager for the Oregon road usage charging program. The strategy became reality, and I started the Azuga RUC business. Our first win as a commercial account manager was for the Oregon program named OReGO.
It launched on July 1, 2015.
California
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) started working on their pursuit of road charging (CA dropped the word ‘usage’ because they thought RUC was not a nice sounding acronym) in 2014 – around the time that Oregon was seeking their first bidders for their program. In 2015, California selected Azuga as one of four companies to provide account management services to more than 5,000 participants in the state’s nine-month pilot. It was the largest research pilot in the nation. In addition to all of the standard account management services, I developed a design for the California project that expanded the number of mileage reporting options from one to five mileage reporting options.
Colorado
Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) launched a search for a firm to run a road usage charging pilot in the state for some of it’s key state level decision makers. They wished to see how a RUC program worked and if it was something that could help solve the impending issue of the drop in revenue from gas taxes in the state. I bid on the project and won. I launched the pilot product in 2016. For this project, I designed and launched as part of the product a manual entry mileage reporting option which allowed participants to enter their odometer readings into a mobile app. This new method proved to be successful and subsequently I moved this method to the production system in the Oregon program.
Hawaii
Hawaii’s two-part research program, The HiRUC Technology Test Drive, explored road usage charges as a viable road funding alternative. I bid on this important project and won in 2018. Approximately 1,800 participants chose from three of Azuga’s mileage reporting options: location-enabled and non-location enabled devices, and odometer image capture. One of the new features I designed and implemented for this project was a fleet management interface. Early on in other projects it was apparent that the consumer facing design to my Azuga RUC product was not sufficient for fleet managers. The HI RUC project proved out that the fleet management interface concept I designed would work much more intuitively. The fleet project also was the first time we implemented a bulk upload feature that proved we could ingest data from multiple vehicles all at once for a single account.
The ETC
The Eastern Transportation Coalition (TETC) is a partnership of 17 states and the District of Columbia dedicated to bringing the East Coast voice to the national discussion around mileage-based user fees (MBUF). My small but mighty RUC business team within Azuga was integral to each of the four research phases of the study with over 2,000 participants. I worked with the stakeholders of TETC to pursue and test a multitude of features and functions. The two that were unique to TETC was a tolling overlay and automatic distribution of miles driven based on garaging address.
RUC America
During my time at Azuga one of the more interesting projects I bid on and won was one for RUC America – a consortium of states that are collaborating on all things RUC. For this project, they wanted to test out various technical concepts of RUC for autonomous vehicles. Because the autonomous vehicles that were part of this test were all within the same company, they acted more like a set of fleet vehicles than passenger vehicles. The interesting technology I was able to assist in designing and building was the direct integration between my RUC platform and the autonomous vehicle data collection platform. I was able to help RUC America prove that bulk data integration was not only possible, but it showed that involvement of fleets can be done at very little time expense of the fleet manager.
Drive Wise
In 2007 I was working in the Marketing Innovation department at Allstate and was tasked with looking into the technology aspects of this thing called “telematics”. To make a long story short, I helped the company go from just a pure concept on paper to testing out various technologies to designing and then launching the Drivewise usage based insurance product. It quickly became of one of the Allstate agents favorite product to sell. It went from a simple 4 million dollar budget to a 50 million dollar budget. I ran the Drivewise program for 4 years and launched it in multiple states.