DOCUMENTATION: US toll plaza design documented

A number of toll authorities and consulting firms have documented standards for designing and outfitting toll plazas, but these are generally kept in-house as proprietary information. The Transp Research Board (TRB) report “Toll Plaza Design: a Synthesis of Highway Practice” is the first publicly available documentation of toll plaza practices in the US. It started with a long questionaire sent out to 60 toll operators (US members of the IBTTA) and is based on replies from 25 of them, who answered questions about 47 different toll facilities they operate — representing a bit under half of those in the US. They seem a fair sample of tunnels, bridges and turnpikes and a fair geographical spread, except that none of the agencies between Philadelphia and Florida responded, and only one in Calif. There’s a heap of new and unique information here about the dimensions and geometrics of toll plazas, construction materials and standards, toll collection methods, transitions between the plaza and the mainline, lighting, drainage, safety devises, canopies, toll booths, lane equipment, estimates of lane capacity, features of mainline plazas and the admin building, pavement markings, signage, lane configurations, reversibility. The details are tabulated in a good appendix.

Though flawed (see sharp criticism following) the report will probably be a very useful reference for anyone concerned with building or rebuilding their toll facilities or simply curious about how theirs compare with others. But read it skeptically!

This project was conducted at the indolent pace of Washington DC at its worst. It took over 4 years in the production, which made the report instant history on publication day, and accounts for one picture of a now demolished toll plaza (on the since de-tolled Norfolk-Virginia Beach Exwy) and more important the odd-sounding reference (p53) to a “reluctance in going forward with ETC (electronic toll collection).” No reluctance now! Virtually every toll agency in the country by now either has ETC or a firm plan to implement it. Also obsolete is the claim that nearly a half of the facilities toll lanes have automatic coin machines (ACMs). ETC is seeing ACMs junked as coins and tokens are replaced by transponders and the current fraction would be much less.

The survey shows automatic exit gates used in only 2% of manual collection lanes, at about half the automatic coin machine equipped lanes and a tenth of ETC lanes. Video enforcement (camera triggered by a violation) is present at 30% of the facilities with little difference between different forms of collection, a surprising result because violations seem more likely at remote unmanned plazas — and perhaps an obsolete result too. Revenue losses through toll evasion are “closely guarded” statistics, the report says, but 2% is suggested as a minimum. And losses it says are higher in automatic lanes and at remote plazas — not surprising if so many are (or were) without video enforcement.

Most of the physical constructs described have not changed much, except that new (and less ugly) impact attenutators are available for the bullnoses of toll islands. Almost universal are some things — concrete pavement in the toll lanes, elaborate lighting, a plethora (perhaps a super-plethora) of signage, approach lanes markings, and Siegfried line type defenses of the collector booths against errant vehicles. Of interest is the wide range of designs of toll booths, varying 10-fold in inside floor area between 20 sq ft (8’ x 2’6) at the Grosse Il Bridge MI and 212 sq ft (7’8 x 28’8) in Orlando FL (TR newsletter will sleuth out the secrets of this reported toll mansion, perhaps to accomodate some ridiculous giant Disney-character toll collector?) Toll lanes vary between 9’ and 12’ but 2/3 are between 10’ and 11’, the average being 10’9. That seems ideal for cars and other light vehicles, anything wider causing some drivers to pull in too far from the coin machine or the collector, but it is tight for heavy trucks.

About a half the surveyed facilities have some reversible toll lanes. A fair proportion of the plazas with coin machines have tunnels and coins go into vaults down there, but few collectors use the tunnels to get to their booths. Most stick dedicated ETC and ACM in left lanes, but there is no data on how far e-tolling and auto coin are intermixed in the same toll lanes — that of course is something that is changing day by day and difficult to gain data on.

The author editorializes against the diversity of practices between agencies without much recognition of the diversity of circumstances or of the problem of standards — that they may inhibit innovation, and that the standards setting process itself sometimes produces poor standards.

Mars! Call ya lawyers: The report notes that bill acceptors are used in Europe but not much in the US because of “lack of reliability” (p44). Funny that a technology that is found reliable in Europe isn’t here! And that tens of thousands of bill acceptors are sold to operators of US soda and other vending machines including those that sell transit tickets. Any problems peculiar to the US are attributable not to the machines (US bill acceptors are sold worldwide) but to the disgraceful crumpled condition of so many US dollar bills kept in circulation by Uncle Sam long beyond their decent lifespan. Having run a little vending business with 25 bill acceptors, 1990-94, I can personally attest to their remarkable performance with all but the most wretchedly faded and crumpled bills.

Credit cards are accepted at more manual lanes with the collector swiping than automatic coin lanes with the patron swiping the card, the survey suggests, but this may have changed since the survey (April 94) as toll facilities are increasingly offering self-swipe at their unmanned ramp plazas.

Verbal smog: The conceptual stuff in this document is incompetent. It fails to clearly state the distinction between two basic toll principles (1) point tolling and (2) trip tolling. In point tolling a toll is levied on each vehicle passing a toll point. All bridges and tunnels point toll. And many toll highways, so for example on the Garden State Parkway a series of plazas, most across the mainline, represent the toll points and the total toll levied depends on the number of points passed, and is the sum of the amounts of cash thrown into automatic coin machines or money paid at the various toll plazas along the way. Similarly on the Melbourne City Link the toll to be levied will depend on the number of points passed, tolling points being on the mainline in the form of electronic transceivers and license plate readers on a gantry located between each interchange, the vehicle generating an additional toll debit each time a toll point is passed, each time the vehicle goes under a gantry. In trip tolling, by contrast, the toll is levied according to the trip made on the toll facility, so on the New Jersey Turnpike each driver entering must pull a magstripe ticket from a machine on entry and hand it to an attendant on exit and pay the trip toll, and on 407-ETR in Toronto tolling transceivers and license plate readers are situated over all entry and exit ramps and the trip bills are generated by a matching of entry and exit registrations.

This TRB document muddies the issue by using the terms ‘cash’ and ‘ticket’ in a clumsy allusion to the principles of point and trip tolling. A ticket is the medium for most trip tolls pre-ETC since it provides the toll collector evidence at exit of the motorist’s entry point and allows the trip toll to be computed. But with electronic tolling as on 407-ETR, or the NY State Thruway with E-ZPass in rural sections, there is no ticket. The term needed is ‘trip’ which is the logical basis for the toll and the principle being applied on the Pennsylvania, NJ and other such ‘ticket’ turnpikes. Similarly ‘cash’ is a term for a medium of payment, not a principle of tolling. Cash means coins or bills and can be used to pay either a point toll or a trip toll. Moreover both point tolls and trip tolls can be levied without the use of cash.

Sometimes the term ‘barrier’ tolling has been used to describe point tolling because the toll plaza at which you pay is a barrier. But since all manual payment plazas are in a sense barriers, ‘barrier’ is an inapt term for point tolling. And when, as on the point-tolling San Joaquin Hills pike in California, FasTrak (e-toll) users fly along at full highway speed under various toll transceivers the term ‘barrier’ tolling seems hardly more appropriate than this document’s inept term ‘cash.’

The terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ have sometimes been used to describe point and trip tolling, since when a toll is levied at a point the facility is open in the sense of being devoid of any ticket-dispensing toll plaza at the entry, whereas a ‘closed’ system has entry plazas. As dey say to me once on de Joisiepike: “You no takah da ticket, you violator.” But ‘open’ is also used to describe systems which have certain sections of roadway that can be used free-of-toll. Typically local trips can be made free because there are no mainline toll plazas between certain interchanges, and no ramp plazas either. The placement of point toll plazas is such that only longdistance patrons pay the tolls. But if there are point tolls between every interchange then such ‘open’ systems can collect tolls from every traveler and by the other definition are ‘closed’. The TRB document defines the term ‘open’ to mean a toll facility in which some trips are free, and ‘closed’ to mean one in which all vehicles which enter are liable for a toll. So there is an exquisite ambiguity in this confused use of the terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Why not ‘part-tolled’ and ‘fully-tolled’?

The TRB does no service spewing this verbal smog around ‘cash’ and ‘ticket’ and ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Toll roads are most of the time ‘open’ in the commonsense meaning that they want business, and are not closed to traffic. But when, say, a tanker truck of nitro-glycerine turns over and its billowing leakages threaten an enormous fiery oomph, then the toll road is closed...we hope. (This review highlights sloppy aspects of this report which nevertheless contains much valuable data and is recommended to readers to purchase so long as they skip its clumsy conceptual mumblings and remember that its data is now over 3 years old. Contact TRB tel 202 334 2933 for “Toll Plaza Design: a Synthesis of Highway Practice” by Albert Schaufler, NCHRP Synthesis 240, Transp Research Board 1997, 113 pages, $25, www.nas.edu/trb)