Is this thing an Abrams or a Sheridan?

Now Toronto has survived 209 years since it was purchased by the British from the local Indians in 1787, and it has prospered and grown into a great North American metropolis of 5m without an all-electronic gee-whiz toll road around its northern fringe, so a few months of fuss and delay is not going to make or break the project over the long haul. We'll need a year or so to really know how this project is doing. I used to report defense. The US Army's M-1 Abrams tank when it first had field trials in the late 1970s looked a real lemon and was reported as such with great relish by Pentagon news dogs like this. Its tracks wore out after a day or so's use and sometimes fell off. The turbine engines overheated, used twice as much fuel as they were supposed to, and the high pitched whine threatened to announce an M-1 arrival to enemy gunners long before armor pieces equipped with traditional diesel growlers. The new gun barrel smoked...The punch list of M-1 problems was horrendous. But they fixed 'em all over about 2 years and fixed 'em so well that it was soon judged the best main battle tank in the world — stealthy, rugged, agile, more deadly than anything else. But the media kept that a secret from the US public until Desert Storm! By contrast there was the earlier M-551 Sheridan light tank which got a far better media coverage. It had less spectacular problems to start with, but which they never managed to fix... and the US Army quietly abandoned the M-551 to the parking lots of the National Guard, never being used to risk U.S. soldiers in combat. What turned out to be a world champ was initally adjudged to be a flop, and the more promising model initially never worked properly, so don't rely on the newspapers for your news.

So will Toronto's Highway 407 be an M-1 or an M-551, an Abrams or a Sheridan? Like both of the mobile killing contraptions H-407 is a bold effort to make a quantum leap forward in technology, attempting to do several things that have never been done before for highways:

• mass automated license plate recognition (so far it has only been done to catch the odd hit-and-run evader)

• mass automated matching of entry and exit license plate reads

• use of two different but supposedly interoperable transponder systems (Hughes and Mark IV) one to IAG (NY,NJ,PA) specs, the other not

• a new time and distance variable toll rate regime

• full highway speed vehicle classification

It's an effort to implement several revolutionary advances all at once.