Tampa EL going great - underlines case for all electronic toll collection

Tampa's Reversible Express Lanes (EL) are going great. And the Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority (THEA), its owner, is being showered with awards for the innovative project. The three elevated lanes in the median of the established 2x2 lanes of the eastern part of the Selmon Crosstown Expressway have transformed the peak hour trips of people traveling to inner and downtown Tampa. Queueing and creep made the ten mile commute an average of 30 minutes when there were just two lanes of the old expressway inbound.

Now with three reversible lanes added there are a total of five lanes available in the peak direction. With 2.5 times the roadspace what used to be a 20 to 40 minute is now ten minutes of relaxing free flow. Motorists have responded as you'd expect. They are coming off the Adamo Drive and other parallel surface arterials and onto the expressway now that it's offering a so much better trip.

Total traffic is up 3 or 4% despite a 50% increase in the toll - from $1.00 to $1.50 - implemented along with the opening of the elevated express lanes to full operations at the beginning of this year.

Traffic on the EL - read that as express lanes or 'el' for elevated - is around 15k/day, above forecasts for the first year.

It isn't just run for commuters. They run the EL homebound after events at the St Pete Times Arena downtown, allowing big crowds of people to move out of the area eastward and home without much queuing.

The El has its own dedicated distributor downtown, a very handsome boulevard that intersects a handful of city streets on the eastside. The old expressway now serves as local lanes since it has more interchanges, and for contra-peak flow traffic.

The equipment?

Marty Stone, planning director at Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority (THEA) says the open road toll equipment has worked "flawlessly" from the beginning. It helped, he concedes, that they had plenty of time to check it out in short hours operations to start with, and then opened it in phases.

It is a major and complicated installation on twin gantries covering the three travel lanes plus the breakdown shoulder on each side - for five lanes coverage. And it is most unusual among electronic toll gantries in that it has to work reverses of traffic direction each day.

The system's front end is:
* Three sets of in-pavement loops per lane for a total of 15 to do detection of vehicles and classification by axle count using digital signal processing
* 18 readers above to look for radio signals from windshield-mounted transponders, 9 cones of coverage for each direction
* 24 cameras supported by lights, 12 facing each direction are available looking upstream for getting images of the rear of vehicles
* a network switch and just two lane controllers operate the system

The cameras capture an image of the license plate area and other vehicle characteristics. Only second and subsequent images are dealt with automatically. The first photograph is always checked by an operator at a display - a process called "truthing with human review" in the rather awkward jargon of the camera trade. In Florida a PULNiX system uses both optical character recognition to pull the license plate, and so-called "fingerprinting" of the shape and position of major rear end features of the vehicle are characterized for future matching.

Florida's Turnpike Enterprise (FTE) does all toll collection for the Tampa Authority. FTE in turn has contracted the Tampa EL's open road toll system to TransCore which designed and supplied the system and operates it for FTE. This is a large and complex installation with five lanes coverage, and the first we know of with reversible or two-direction electronic toll collection.

Video tolling

It is also Florida's first effort at video tolling, which goes under the title "Pay by Plate." It was instituted Nov 1, 2006.

There has been no marketing effort, Stone says, just signs and instructions on the expressway website. That is because they don't see huge potential for video tolling on what is mainly a commuter facility with heavy use of transponders by the regulars. Also they want to study how it works and see if changes are needed before deciding whether there's a case for promoting it.

There are two video toll options:

- a Pay-by-Plate account in which motorists prepay from $5.00 and up, established by a call to 1-888-TAG-TOLL providing a description of the vehicle, the license plate number and a credit/debit card to pay the tolls

- a Day Pass

Video tolls are charged at the cash toll rate - $1.75 as against $1.50 for the transponder toll. Payment can be made up to 72 hours after travel by a toll point. Tolls unpaid after that 3 day period become violations

There are just under 500 active video toll accounts and to date about 900 day passes have been done. So it's small, so far.

Violations about 5%

Marty Stone says that the express lanes have about the same violation rate as the rest of the system - around 5%. He says the rate is "higher than we'd like" but the problem has not been exacerbated by open road tolling.

He thinks they will move to all electronic toll collection within about five years but there is no timetable. In the express lanes they will, at some point, do variable pricing, probably within 5 to 10 years.

I-4 Connector

About a mile before downtown Tampa traveling westward the express lanes's bridging ends and they drop down onto embankment. That's in preparation for a slew of ramps joining the Selmon from an I-4/Selmon Connector project, a massive and complicated interchange linking the two east-west expressways and providing north-south connectivity from I-4 to the port and downtown area through Ybor City.

The Connector is a project of Florida DOT and only portions connected to the Selmon will be tolled. It will also provide segregated lanes for truck traffic going to and from the port. Wholly on structure the facility is now two-thirds designed, and is estimated to cost $550m. It may be built in stages.

see http://mytbi.com/urs/content/Design/I4-CrosstownConnector/index.asp

Opening of the Connector in the period 2012 to 2014 will increase traffic on the Selmon Crosstown from an expected 2014 no-connector number of 115k/day to 142k/day, or a boost of nearly a quarter.

Being able to move between the two east-west routes traffic facing congestion on I-4 will be able to move over to the tollroad. I-4 has been going through a planned widening to 2x3 lanes but is unlikely to be widened further for many years.

The tollroad on the other hand can do third and perhaps 4th laning at the ground level though it has no forseable need to do that.

A Gandy Connector at the western end is a smaller project that would improve to expressway standard the connection to the Gandy Causeway over Old Tampa Bay.

THEA has promoted study of a north south peripheral highway several miles easy of I-75 and a northern east-west road.

BACKGROUND: Toll revenues last financial year were $29.3m but are heading for $45m this year. Operating expenses in 2006 were $8.3m. Traffic is around 95k toll transactions per day.

The Selmon Crosstown (toll) Expressway was built in stages, opening as follows:
- 8km (5 miles) west and south of downtown Tampa to MacDill Air Force Base 1975 with an extension in 1979
- 16km (10 miles) east of downtown Tampa over I-75 to Brandon 1986

All this is 2x2 lanes expressway, elevated through the downtown area only.

The later eastern section saw the most rapid growth in traffic because of development out east.

A third laning proposal (going from 2x2 lanes to 2x3 lanes) was rejected as liable to be overwhelmed with peak hour traffic and in the late 1990s under Pat McCue a reversible plan alternative settled on. Initially it was to be 2 lanes reversible, but the extra cost of the third lane (for most of the distance) was low enough to sell the extra capacity of a third lane.

The 2/3/2 format is designed to carry 115k/veh/day near downtown and 75k at the eastern end.

10km (6 miles) of the 15km (9mi) of expressway are on bridge structure - segmental concrete box girder - the roadway deck being 18m (59ft) wide on a single row of columns 1.8m (6ft) wide - a design by Figg Engineering. The other third is close to ground level or elevated on fill.

Construction started Aug 2002 and proceeded smoothly to about two-thirds completion until April 2004 when a pier subsided into the ground. Poor geotechnical characterization of ground conditions and inadequate design of pilings by engineers at URS was blamed. THEA executive director Pat McCue was fired.

Under Ralph Mervine his successor URS was removed and sued, column foundations were strengthened, and work resumed. A year was lost. The facility opened in stages from July 2006 through January 2007.

Total project cost was $420m for a project with about 27 lane-miles (44 lane-km) of expressway - a cost of about $10m/lane-km or $16m/lane-mile.

Mervine resigned last year over a sideline erotic business fuss, and Steve Reich became temporary chief executive. Selection is under way of a new head. 

PHOTO CREDIT: top pic is from the great roads website:  aaroads.com

ee http://www.tampa-xway.com

TOLLROADSnews 2007-06-07