BAY AREA Caltrans bridge e-toll conversion off to slow start

BAY AREA

Caltrans bridge e-toll conversion off to slow start

Caltrans has gotten off to a slow start in electronic toll conversion on its San Francisco Bay area bridges. It first e-toll lane opened to the public July 30 last on the Carquinez bridge and Charles Price, Caltrans project director for electronic toll collection (ETC) says progress has been slower than hoped for.

“As far as our patrons are concerned it is working fine. The accuracy is about what we expected but we have some work still to get rid of some glitches in the system. We’re hoping to have it worked through in the next few months. Once we’ve got it working right here, we will move rapidly to deploy the system on the other bridges in the Bay area.”

About 8,000 tags have been issued in the area. With just the one lane in operation about 4,000 electronic toll transactions a day are being registered out of 60,000 total tolls on the bridge, which carries I-80 over a neck of the northern Bay and is one of three motorway standard routes between the Bay area and the state capital Sacramento and points east.

Tolls are levied going south only and there are a total of 12 toll lanes at the plaza.

Price says the plaza is most stretched in the afternoon peak, but that the dedicated ETC lane has been handling traffic well. It is located about the middle of the plaza and there is no speed limit for electronic tolling because collectors have a tunnel. Traffic cruises through the 10 foot (3m) between the concrete curbs of the ETC lane at 30 to 40 mph.

Prime contractor for the conversion is MFS Network Technologies now part of the WorldCom telecommunications group. MFS has said the project has been difficult and it is well behind original schedules (TRnl#5 Jul 96 p6, also TRnl#16 Jun 97 p5.) The major problem was doing automatic vehicle classification for the multiplicity of vehicle types that were in the California toll schedule. In part, because of those difficulties, laws were amended and in October last a simpler axle-based schedule of classes was implemented.

The vehicle to roadside communications equipment (readers and transponders) is TI/now Sirit gear similar to that used on 91-X, and the TCA toll roads in southern Calif. There the toll tags operate in free flow open road conditions of quite moderate volumes of traffic travelling between 55 and 75 mph, almost entirely cars. The Bay area bridges are different in that traffic is heavier and involves a more diverse mix of vehicles at very varied speeds.

Cash tolls on the major Bay bridges were increased from $1.00 to $2.00 Jan 1 this year. A book of 40 tickets is $74, a 15c/trip discount on the cash toll, and e-toll users get the same 15c break.

Charles Price says 15c probably is not much of an incentive in itself to get a FasTrak tag, as the transponders are called in Calif. But he thinks there will be a big run on them once they are usable on other bridges. Many commuters, he says, use two or more bridges each trip and the convenience will really be evident once ETC is available at all the major bridges. Price says he expects the department will phase out the discounted tickets just as New York has phased out discounted tokens, and that this will really make electronic tolling take off. But no decisions of that kind have been made.

Plans are to install a single dedicated ETC lane at the Richmond-San Rafael, Benicia, San Mateo and Dunbarton bridges and two ETC-only lanes at the giant Bay Bridge (250k veh/day), and more will be added as needed. ETC is capable of 1500 veh/hr as configured at the Bay area plazas comapred to 500 veh/hr for collectors, Price says.

State senator Quentin Kopp has been publicly pressing Caltrans and MFS to move more quickly in implementing electronic tolling at all the Bay area bridges. The doubling of the toll has reduce throughput on the manual collection lanes and increased backups. Kopp sees ETC as an answer to unpopular lines at the plazas. (Contact Charles Price Caltrans 510 286 4478)