407-ETR marketing

407 ETR marketing

No longwinded euphemisms like transportation corridor or silly evasions like greenway for this new Toronto Canada pike. It's an "Express Toll Route" and if its operations match the clarity of its marketing it should be a boomer. Anyone wanting to find out about the project or steal some good pike marketing ideas should get their own Information Package (Anne Boody 416 326 6199 boodya@epo.gov.on.ca). Some highlights:

• the sales pitch to commuters: "Still inching along in traffic? Why crawl across the city, when you can sail like the wind along the ETR, saving yourself time and stress? With 29 interchanges to take you across town, around town and into town, the ETR is the way to go. Zip across town for pennies per kilometer. No toll booths to hold you up. No traffic holdups to slow you down."

• the pitch to business: "Time stuck in traffic is money lost and no help to your bottom line. With the time savings on the ETR 407 Express Toll Route, toll costs can be money well spent and an investment in customer service. You know where you are going. Wouldn't it be great to know when your delivery will get there? Of course it would. And with the ETR 407 Express Toll Route, you will. Try it. Experience for yourself the convenient and predictable ETR, where you're on the move all the time. No more missed deliveries. No more late arrivals. No more one, two, three hour rush hours. It's about time."

• a slogan: "Zip across town. Zip into the office. Zip home. Zip off to the game, the movie, the whatever, wherever."

The toll rate structure uses time variable pricing:

(1) peak periods weekdays 5:30-9:30am and 4:00-7:00pm 10c/km (that's Canadian cents, about US7c)

(2) daytime off-peak weekdays 9:30am-4:00pm 7:00pm-11pm and weekends & holidays 5:30am:11pm 7c/km (US5c)

(3) nighttimes 11:00pm to 5:30am 4c/km (US3c)

Those are for light vehicles under 5t. Single unit heavy vehicles pay twice namely 20c, 14c and 8c/km. Tractor trailers pay three times the light vehicle toll, namely 30c, 21c and 12c.

Of course the 407-ETR is making history by being the world's first plaza-less toll road to welcome motorists without electronic transponders, since it is due to be the first deployment of Hughes license plate recognition and billing system. Welcome isn't quite the word there. Substitute: accomodate. There's a $1 (US70c) penalty toll charge for transponderless Zips in light vehicles. And Hughes isn't trying to read the plates of heavy vehicles. Transponders are mandatory for them.

Another first on 407-ETR: it's electronic tolling will read two separate transponders: the Mark IV system that is also the standard for New York state, and the Hughes I-75/AVION tag used for truck credentialing on long stretches of highway in Canada and the U.S.

Background: 407-ETR is Canada's first big metropolitan toll facility, 36km in length, mostly 6-lanes wide (space for widening to 10-lanes), all concrete pavement, located along the rather flat featureless northern fringe of the Toronto metro area, but keyed into the metro expresway grid it has some spectacular 4-level stack interchanges and an amazing number of diamond ICs with local roads.

The project was planned by the Ontario Ministry of Transport which started work on some sections early in the decade but did not have the funding to push it ahead. In early 1993 the government asked for private sector proposals to complete the 69km highway. These trimmed 20% from the overall cost, to about C$1b, US$700m. A government corporation Ontario Transportation Capital Corporation (OTCC) was formed and sold bonds that provide most of the capital funds. The bonds are secured on toll revenues to be garnered by Canadian Highways International Corporation (CHIC), the highway developer, builder and contracted operator of the road once it opens. CHIC began construction in May 1994. It used standardized precast concrete bridge decks for 191 bridge structures and a new concrete pavement design suited to the miserable tundra-like climate. The first section of 36km (H-410 at Brampton to H-404 Richmond Hill) is due to open December 1996.

Work is already underway on extensions at both ends so that by 1998 69km should be open from H-403 in Oakville to Markham Rd near Scarboro. A major function of the new highway is to relieve the overload on H-401, a 16-lane megaway that traverses the middle of the metro area parallel to the lakeshore. Another 24km extension west of 407-ETR to the port of Hamilton is likely at some point. A more ambitious idea facing strong environmental opposition is an eastward extension of about 80km past the northern fringes of Oshawa and Durham to meet H-35 and H-115, making for another route between Toronto and the national capital Ottawa. (See map and report TR#2, April 1996, p7)

Who was first with what

Electronic tolling started in the late 1980s on the Lincoln tunnel under the Hudson River in New York city, on the toll causeways near New Orleans Louisiana, on the Oklahoma turnpike, in Hong Kong and other places, but it was then just an adjunct to automatic coin collection and manual collection by attendants at toll plazas. And it required the vehicle with the electronic transponder to be confined to a single lane by concrete lane dividers and to go through this defined space at less than full highway speed, often waiting for a gate barrier to be activated.

Electronic tolling has developed steadily, but arguably highway speed all-electronic tolling without any plaza is a qualitative leap in technology. Such plazaless toll collection is not a year old. ETR-407 is the world's second toll road without manual collection. SR-91 Express Lanes (EL) in Orange Co California which opened in December 1995 is arguably the world's first all electronic toll road. Costing $126m, 16km long, 4-lanes, with no intermediate interchanges, it is a simple facility compared to ETR-407 — $700m cost, 36km length, 6-lanes and 16 intermediate interchanges in the first section. The tolling task on ETR-407 is vastly more demanding because of all those interchanges and associated per km toll charging. Every vehicle to be tolled has to be automatically classified and identified on entry and matched on exit, so that the toll can be computed according to distance travelled, whereas on SR-91EL no large trucks are allowed and since without intermeidate interchanges all cars that emerge have travelled the one distance and a single barrier toll gantry suffices. Also SR-91EL handles the problem of motorists without transponders by excluding them.

ETR-470 is the first toll road in the world which in addition to issuing transponders is attempting to use automatic license plate recognition technology for routine billing (as opposed to catching violators.) If this can be made to work satisfactorily — and there are plenty of skeptics — then it will be the world's first fully automated open toll facility, and it will be the true pioneer of plazaless, free-flow tolling. Toll roads in Sydney, Melbourne, Stockholm, Haifa and central Israel, and the Phoenix AZ valley are all being designed to use the license plate recognition system that Hughes is implementing at ETR-470 and which is certain to bring ITS-tourists from around the world to Toronto in the next few years.

Tauern A10: a couple of European magazines have touted the A10 Tauern autobahn in Austria as the world's first free flow electronic toll road. This is the eastern-most route between Germany and Italy through the Austrian Alps. 43km of this are tolled including including the 6.4km long Tauern tunnel and a similar sized Katschberg tunnel. The Austrian highway company Osterreicheische-autobahnen-und Schnellstrassen Aktien Gesellschaft (OSAG for the tongue-tied) doubled the single tube 2-lane tunnels in recent years to bring the route to expressway standard in return for a toll concession. At Oberweissberg between the two tunnels a gantry over the roadway is described as the world's first unmanned all-electronic multilane toll collection system having begun operations in November 1995. That was with staff using transponders and testing the system, at about the same time as SR-91EL was testing its similar system. SR-91EL was first into regular revenue service in the last days of 1995. Moreover the A10 continues to collect tolls manually as well as by transponder, at a toll plaza at St Michael 1.5km away from the electronic gantry.