WHO WAS FIRST? Open road e-tolling 'MULORET'

Someone is certain to claim that Highway 407 in Toronto is the first highway with automatic open road electronic tolling. That claim was made on behalf of the Tauern Autobahn in Austria in 1995, and 91-Express in California in 1996, and I was told by someone when revisiting my old home town Melbourne Australia last year that their City Link toll road will be the world's first in 2001. Definition: by open road tolling we mean Multiple Lane Open Road Electronic Tolling (acronym MULORET!) in which two or more traffic lanes remain free of any physical channelling such as raised concrete kerbs or plaza portals. In open road electronic tolling vehicles must be successfully tolled straddling line markings and travelling at very high speeds. Open road tolling is more demanding technologically than lane-constrained e-tolling (1) because the reader(s) on the gantry above doesn't (don't) know quite where to expect their customers to pass below and (2) because without any physical constraints many of them will be through there a lot faster.

As far as I can establish open road e-tolling was pioneered on the Oklahoma Turnpike on the morning of September 1, 1991 on three turnpikes simultaneously using Amtech equipment. The design goes back to 1990, when designs were being done for the first full electronic conversion of a complete turnpike system. The nine established Oklahoma turnpikes got conventional single lane e-toll equipment that made use of the existing concrete-curb lane-separated toll gates. But three new turnpikes the Kilpatrick, Cherokee and Chickasaw were just starting construction and they were designed around electronic tolling. The manual payment plazas were set to the side and open road tolling was designed around a pair of non-channelized lanes that allow motorists with e-tags to sail right by the plazas. An interesting sidelight — Amtech's e-tags which had been used successfully in single lane tolling on the Lake Ponchartrain causeway in New Orleans, the Lincoln tunnel in New York City and on the Dallas North Toll Road without batteries (they are passive backscatter technology which at its most basic 'reflects' back a signal received from the roadside transceiver) did not have sufficient range to achieve required accuracy in high speed open road tests a year before the system went public, so Amtech redesigned them to carry a battery and amplifier, and they worked well right from the opening, according to the OK Turnpike.

Other manufacturers made MULORET work too. Combitech's installation in on the Tauern autobahn in Austria is described nearby. MFS designed it around Texas Instruments e-tags for 91-Express in Orange County California which opened in the last days of 1995. If 91-Express was not first in employing open-road tolling, it was the first plaza-less toll road, the first to be open only to vehicles carrying electronic transponders. So it was the first all-electronic tollway (though of course it is a simple one in that it has one toll section with no intermediate access or egress). The other two major US manufacturers Mark IV and Hughes are involved on Toronto's 407-Express Toll Route. Their tags have been used for several years for vehicle-to-roadside communications in the heavy truck electronic license plate program in an open road context.

407 in Toronto without any cash acceptance plazas is going to be the first complex multi-interchange toll expressway system to rely solely on open road tolling. It's legitimate "firsts" are (1) its application in a complex many stage highway and (2) its sole reliance on open road e-tolling. (This has been exceedingly difficult to write because there are many different opinions. More comments, additions, corrections welcome — to tollroads@aol.com)