E-TOLL IN OZ Melbourne City Link won by Combitech

E-TOLL IN OZ

Melbourne City Link won by Combitech

Combitech has won a strongly contested contract to implement automatic tolling on the City Link project in Melbourne, Australia’s second city (pop 3m). City Link is a new inner area L-plan highway system linking three radial motorways that were stopped short of the central business district in the anti-highway era of the 1970s when plans for an inner Ring Road were abandoned in the face of protests. The Southern Link mostly in two 3-lane tunnels (3.4km and 1.6km) extends inwards to the CBD the Southeastern Freeway which serves the metro area’s largest concentration of newly developing suburbs and connects it to the western Westgate Freeway that presently terminates on the southern fringe of the CBD. The Western Link, being built on 5km bridging, links these to the Tullamarine Freeway heading northwesterly to the airport and northern parts of the state. The whole project both bypasses and improves access to the central business district and the port of Melbourne.

No toll plazas: It is dual 3-lane section with 7 significant interchanges and 6 separate toll sections and will cost about $1 billion. Like Highway 407 in Toronto there will be no provision on City Link for manual toll payment and no toll plazas. City Link officials have said that tolling would be by transponder for regular users with a check by automatic license plate recognition for users who have obtained a day pass. The contract announcements make no mention of license plate recognition or enforcement, though Combitech suggests that the system on the Tauern Autobahn in Austria is a model for City Link. Combitech says the contract provides for 13 automatic toll stations based on over-road gantries and 600,000 transponders. The system will use 5.8Ghz backscatter technology. The contract is “worth initially between SEK200 and 300” ($26m to $40m) according to Combitech, and “over (Australian) $40m” ($31m) according to Transurban. Officials in Australia said MFS proposing a 91-Express style system with Texas Instruments tags and Hughes proposal with 407-Toronto technology were over-priced. This left Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Combitech as the finalists.

“First free flow...” Combitech says in its press release that City Link will be “the first to be based entirely on the so-called free-flow principle.” The free-flow principle of highway speed tolling was implemented for motorists with Amtech transponders on three new turnpikes in Oklahoma in Sep 1991. In California 91-Express was the first in December 1995 to introduce a transponders-only (MFS/Texas Instruments), no-plaza toll operation. Highway 407 in Canada will in a few weeks, or so, be the first highway to use a combination of Hughes/Mark IV transponders for regular users and license plate recognition for occasional light vehicle users, so it can claim to be the first entirely free-flow toll facility designed to cater for occasional as well as regulars with automatic tolling. Being on the periphery of the metro area 407 is expected to carry only 30k to 50k veh/day whereas City Link in the center of Melbourne should carry traffic in the 50k to 90k v/d range. City Link should be the world’s largest fully-automatic toll road measured by traffic volume, though it could be challenged for this title by the Cross Israel Highway that is about 2 years behind it.

City Link was originally to open in 2000 but officials say that tunneling and other works are ahead of schedule and now name 1999 for the opening. It is being built under a Build-Own-Operate-Transfer franchise from the state of Victoria by Transurban City Link Limited, formed by Transfield, a Sydney-based construction company. Construction is by Transfield and Obayashi of Japan, tolling is to be conducted by TransLink, a joint venture of Transfield and Transroute of France. (Transurban 61 3 9240 6940, Combitech 46 36 194 384 www.transurban.com.au)