News

2013-02-17: The New York State Thruway is converting two mainline and one side toll plaza to all electronic or cashless toll collection.

2013-02-15: Officials in Texas and Oklahoma say their electronic toll systems could be interoperable in 2014. Chairman of the Team Texas Interoperability Committee Clayton Howe says the exact timing will be up to Oklahoma to decide but indications are it could be up and running by the end of the year.

2013-02-14: The USEPA is making a mockery of President Obama's announced 'fast-tracking" of the PANYNJ project to raise the roadway deck of the Bayonne Bridge for larger ships. At about 150ft, 46m navigation clearance the bridge over the Kill Van Kull channel cannot admit the new generation of larger container ships to the Port of Newark NJ, the largest port on the US east coast.

2013-02-13: AASHTO the state highway officials outfit that bills itself "The Voice of Transportation" was one of several that issued press statements congratulating President Obama on stuff they read into his State of the Union (SoTU) speech.

2013-02-12: IBTTA and many tollers and toll industry suppliers have joined an impressive list of transportation officials signing an ITS America letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging rejection of a move to open 5850MHz to 5925MHz (commonly called 5.9GHz) to WiFi devices. For many years 5.9GHz has been reserved for shortrange use - it is in longrange use by military space radars and satellites uplinks - by surface transportation.

2013-02-11: With tolls now in place on the SR520 Lake Washington crossing Seattle to Redmond, Washington DOT is moving to measure support for tolling the second Lake crossing on the I-90 route Seattle to Issaquah. The crossings are only 3.5 miles, 5.7km apart. Each links I-5 through Seattle with I-405 its twin north-south highway on the eastside of Lake Washington.

2013-02-10: Maryland Transportation Authority (MdTA) is determined treat most of its new toll road patrons as reckless drivers who deserve to be pulled over by the cops and given $80 fines.

2013-02-08: A bill (HB2696) is advancing in the Oregon state legislature to support a proposed investor-financed tollroad - the Coastal Parkway - on the southernwestern part of the Portland metro area. Bob Youngman of Coastal Parkway LLC says the group should be able to move forward if the law passes, and he thinks it has a good chance of passing.

2013-02-07: Most transaction management software looks for transponder reads in a lane that are very close in time to one another and dumps all but one of the reads. Those lines of code to match and dump redundant reads are apparently missing from the ACS/Xerox backoffice data processing algorithms, and ACS programmers are working on adding the function.

2013-02-06: Traffic congestion in the United States seems to have stabilized in the last several years. Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report for the 15 largest metro areas measures average hours of delay per car commuter at 52, the same as the previous year. That is considerably below the 60 hours high of 2005. 32 Large metro areas have 37 hours of delay on average, stable too, and down from 50 hours before the recession.