Austrian open road toll system up but hardly running

The first open road multilane electronic tolling system in Europe has been accepted by its operator, Osterreicheische Autobahnen und Schnellstrassen Aktien Gesellschaft (for tongue-tied English that's OSAG) based in Saltzburg Austria. OSAG is the major private toll road operator in Austria with 200km of turnpike.

The e-toll system from Combitech is on the A-10 Tauern toll autobahn a 43km 4-lane road through the Alps in central Austria, which is the most direct route between southern Germany (Stuttgart and Munich) and the Adriatic Sea ports. It is also the main way from Germany to the Balkan states of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia. Truck traffic is of some importance though not as much as via the Brenner Pass to the west which links Germany with central Italy (E-45 Munich-Verona). But the Tauern runs about 1200 trucks a day and though its average daily vehicle count is tiny by US standards (14k v/d) in the seasons when Germans look for the sun and beaches this is the way they find the magnificent Adriatic coast and then the Tauern traffic can be several times average. Wanting to have the ability to cope with these flows of traffic without having to enlarge its modest toll plazas OSAG was early to move toward e-tolling.

Acceptance of the installation took about 13 months from the time it began operations, leading to a number of reports in the trade that the advanced Combitech system "would not work" and was going to be scrapped. Though the Combitech system began operating with transponders in staff vehicles in the autumn of 1995 electronic tolling is still not available to the public and according to Erhard Gruber, project manager for tolling at OSAG, there are now no plans to go public. He told us OSAG "had every problem you can imagine" but that most of these are now resolved. Problems related mostly to integration of the electronic system with the regular manual tolling plazas. He told us that the major reason the system is not being opened to the general public is that Austria is adopting a nationwide system for charging tolls on the country's autobahns (expwys) and that OSAG does not want to issue the Combitech transponders only to have to withdraw them in a year or two to replace them with a new system based on a different standard, probably the new CEN-278. However the company may make use of the system for tolling trucks. Gruber said there are some problems to be overcome mounting the transponders in trucks because on vertical windshields there have been difficulties getting the right angle for reliable reads. Radio signal attenuation gets quite large when it strikes the glass windshield at an acute angle. The e-tolling of trucks may be conducted in a special constrained lane to simplify data handling, we were told, which however will mean the installation is no longer an open road multi-lane system as advertised.

Combitech faced major challenges according to some engineers since there has been less experience with the 5.8GHz frequency that it is using than the 915Mhz that is commonly used in the US and the 2.45GHz common in Europe. The higher the frequency the more directional the signal whose integrity is also more difficult to maintain in a high speed environment. 5.8GHz is integral to the new European CEN standard for vehicle to roadside communciations as applied to electronic tolling. Moreover the Tauern toll system combines an advanced vehicle classification system and character recognition enforcement equipment with the multi-lane tolling.

Comparisons: Unfortunately for the Europeans comparisons have been made of the still-testing or 'pilot' Tauern system and the Texas Instruments system on 91-Express Lanes in California. The Tauern was up and running first and much advertised as the world's first open-road multilane e-toll installation. Although a couple of months later to begin operation the TI/91-Express system opened to the general public in a matter of several weeks at the end of December 1995 and despite some talk of imperfections the operator says after a year that it works well and few complaints have been heard from the 70,000 motorists now using it.

One report circulating by word of mouth in the trade has been that the Tauern e-toll system achieved an accuracy rate of 97% but OSAG emphatically denies this and says the vehicle ID has achieved 100% accuracy and that the combined vehicle classification and identification system in the multi-lane environment achieved over 98% accuracy in their tests.

The project manager Gerhard Gruber told us recently that OSAG had never intended that the project be more than a pilot project and that there was never an intention to go to fullscale implementation with the public users. This hardly squares with what OSAG told the trade press a year ago. Then it provided details of an imminent publicity campaign to "launch" its e-toll system to the general public including a promotional film. It said users would have a choice of six different contracts. A trade name for the transponders was announced — "Funkmaut." And there were slogans and jingles. A press release said that it was "the first step in an Austria-wide" system.

Combitech's electronic tolling system is generally well spoken of in the trade, though it did poorly in the A555 trials in Germany. Engineers at two major US companies have said Combitech manufactures equipment as good as the best of the backscatter systems, though one of those two told me he thinks even the very best backscatter technology will have trouble achieving very high standards of accuracy in an open road highspeed environment. The Swedish company has a large number of successful single-lane installations around the world (in 15 countries) and claims to be the "world's leading supplier of automatic toll systems" — a claim that might be disputed by Amtech and Mark IV.

Gets Store Baelt: Combitech has not been able to crack the north American market though it has made major efforts. The Florida Turnpike was the last major toll system in the US to make its selection of first generation e-toll equipment (Sunpass) and the award of the contract to Amtech was a major disappointment to the Swedish company. However it has just announced that it has won a major contract in Denmark for the e-toll equipment on the Store Baelt crossing where it will install a "complete automatic four-lane toll system" and 16 tolling and enforcement lane positions. That will apparently be its first open road system to go public in 1998. Combitech was chosen as Store Baelt supplier by the successful prime contractor GEA of France — Europe's leading toll system integrator. Store Baelt (see TR#3 May 96) will be the first crossing to link the main Danish island of Zealand with the mainland of Europe via a pair of bridges 18km long currently under construction. Also under construction though about 2 years behind is the 16km Oresund bridge/tunnel crossing from Zealand to Sweden. The advantages of interoperability have to give the Swedish manufacturer the inside edge on gaining that contract also — so long as the Store Baelt system is working satisfactorily.

Combitech has been a leader in offering the integration of smart cards into electronic tolling and the Store Baelt job involves supply of 25,000 transponders that incorporate smart card readers.

Record under threat: Combitech says the Store Baelt (SB) toll station will be the largest single toll taker in the world. Heck, this is worse than having Kuala Lumpur top the Sears Tower in Chicago, telling us that the venerable Fort Lee NJ plaza of the Geo Washington (GW) bridge ($230m/yr) is being knocked off its perch on the Pallisades as the big bird of world tolling. We thought of calling Vollmer & Assoc for a forecast, then got to work on the calculator with exchange rates and car/truck splits and Danish projections. It's going to be a close one at tolls of DKK200/car ($32), DKK640/truck ($100) if they get 16k veh/day. About $250m/yr we reckon. This obviously clinches the case for introducing congestion pricing tolls on the GW before 1998 — to keep ahead of these raiding Norsemen. Or maybe the $ will rally against the DKK? Except that just as the SB and the GW are battling it out in 1998 for the World Trophy of Tolling, who shoots by the both of us....you guessed it: those Japanese with the Trans-Tokyo Bay Crossing just opened up — 40k veh/day at a quite unconscionable toll of $45 and using transponders from someone like Hitachi! Can't the CIA set up Highway Users Associations in Tokyo and Copenhagen to scream that these toll rates constitute human rights abuses, demanding a toll rollback? (Contacts: Claes Cleason Combitech 46 3619 4384 Claes.Claeson@traffic.combitech.se E. Gruber OSAG 43 662 620511 grubere@ping.at)