REFERENCE:A Flawed Manual on Tolling from TRB

Why not “Tolling Practices in America” since it is entirely an American coverage, and TRB has an international audience. That’s a quibble of course. Then I read that “ETC lanes in an open road configuration are operated by two of the survey respondents,” Oklahoma Turnpike and Denver’s E-470, and that “Harris County Toll Road Authority reports a maximum vehicle speed (through its ETC lanes) of 35mph.” (p21) If someone down there in sweaty Oiltown reported that to the TRB, then it must have been a horrible Houston leg pull, a Texas tease, someone’s mischievous idea of making complete idiots of those pointyheaded guys inside the Beltway. (Maybe someone mixed up Houston with Dallas where indeed they have single lanes for 35mph ET on the Dallas North.)

At 70mph

Harris County’s Sam Houston and Hardy toll roads are all set up for full highway speed tolling. I stood and watched the operations of a plaza on the west leg of the Sam Houston for about 15 minutes a couple of months back with busloads of others from IBTTA. We saw traffic zooming through the open road ETC lanes and I’ll swear hardly one in twenty vehicles slowed even perceptibly, let alone getting anywhere down near 35mph. It is all 65mph to 75mph traffic whistling through. All 9 toll plazas, 36-lanes of open road ETC work, perhaps 100k vehicles/day being tolled at full highway speed in twin open road lanes each direction.

Houston’s toll roads are second only to Toronto’s 210k veh/day open road highway speed tolling - conducted on about 270 ETC lanes (126 ramps, most 2-lane, and a number of 3-laners.)

And what about southern California’s four booming tollroads in Orange Co? They have open road highway-speed ETC at 5 mainline plazas. The TRB’s research methods don’t seem to have caught up with the situation there either. Add up: 91-Express (30k 4-lanes), San Joaquin Hills (30k 4-lanes) and the Eastern (25k, 12-lanes). Heck I might be off a bit, but whichever way you cut it that’s big time open road ETC - about 20 open-road toll lanes and soon approaching Houston in volume.

With the greatest respect the TRB’s examples of Oklahoma and Denver’s open road ET are sidestreet scale compared to Houston and S Calif, let alone Toronto. And the George Bush turnpike now opening up in Dallas will have 30 toll lanes highway speed ETC in configurations of 2x3-lanes beside 5 plazas.

Definitional confusion

However the worst flaw in “Tolling Practice...” is the inept section attempting to spell out toll principles. Like a previous TRB manual on toll plazas, this one attempts to perpetuate the “open/closed” distinction, despite the fact that these words generate endless confusion and make no sense. They are sometimes used to describe a toll road with or without some untolled leg, and at other times to describe where the toll plazas are in general located. In general if the pike is set up to exact tolls at points along the mainline of the road then it will be “open” at the entry ramp in the sense that there will be no toll plaza to dispense a ticket, as on a trip toll turnpike. That’s how the term “open” system originated. Trouble is many toll roads that are set up to point toll in this manner are not in fact “open” at a significant number of interchanges because they extract a toll from motorists right there on the entry ramp at an entry ramp toll plaza. Yet the proponents of the open/closed labeling want to call that an “open” system! Crazy.

“Tolling Practices...” gets deeper in a definitional morass after saying there are three types of toll systems: “The first is a ‘closed’ or ticket system road or turnpike on which the distance traveled, as measured at controlled vehicle entry and exit points, varies with a resulting variation in toll paid by vehicles using the road.” This is an important sentence which no self-respecting professional research organization should ever have published. It is obscure, wrong, and stupid. The distance traveled varies on the heavily “barriered” Garden State Parkway where there are both mainline and ramp point tolls and the amount you pay varies there too according to the number of barrier toll points you pass.

The crucial distinction in tolling principle has nothing to do with whether you travel varying distances and get charged a varying amount. That can be arranged using either a trip toll principle or the point toll where you toll successively at various points along a toll road. The distinction lies in whether the toll system is arranged to register each vehicle on entry and then on exit so as to compute a trip, or whether you levy discrete tolls at discrete points passed as the motorist moves along the facility. The tolling principle separates into trip tolling and point (or spot) tolling. Incidentally the claim that toll bridges and tunnels have a third toll principle is also silly. Crossings have a single point toll just like the simplest imaginable turnpike (except for some international border crossings where there is a point toll on both sides.)

Trip tolling is not identical with a ticket system. The medium by which a toll is levied constitutes another distinction.

The most common current trip toll medium is still a magstripe ticket on which the motorist carries a secured record of his point of entry. But as on the NY State Thruway, 407-Toronto and soon in FL, PA and elsewhere the electronic transponder can also be a medium for trip tolling too, being the means by which entry and exit are registered either on the tag, or to a central toll management system, and the trip toll calculated. Tickets are starting to disappear, but the trip toll principle will live on, transparent to the motorist perhaps, but it will still govern the location of the ET gantries and the way the toll management software is set up.

And as open road highway-speed electronic toll lanes proliferate the old term ‘barrier tolling’ becomes an anachronism. There is no toll “barrier” on the new high-speed multi-lane bypasses of the manual plazas, just ET radio antennas on a gantry spanning several lanes of regular roadway, so they cannot be called “barrier” systems. Better to call them point or spot tolls.

New semantics needed

I look at the list of guys who signed off on this report, several of them friends, and the others are also people I respect. They are not the dummies that the confusions of their document on the definitional points would suggest. They know perfectly well what they are trying to say and are normally capable of clear English. It is just that here they are unable to say what they intend because they cling determinedly to an old semantic verbiage of tolling whose time has passed. It is their attachment to an obsolete and dysfunctional vocabulary that makes monkeys of them.

A small correction: the Lake of the Ozarks Community Bridge Corp MO should not have been listed as private (p10). It is a non-profit without equity capital whose board is appointed by the Missouri DOT, one of those tax lurks for the state to borrow at arms length and without affecting its official debt, while maintaining control. Also 91-X does not any longer allow HOVs for free (p28). They now half-toll, which perhaps make them no longer HOT lanes but an toll express facility.

Not mentioned as a method of toll payment in “Tolling Practices...” is a credit card. They have gas-pump style self-swipe at unmanned ramp plazas on the Dulles Gway and the PA66 and PA60 spurs off the Penna pike mainline, and probably other places I haven’t heard of. And quite a lot of toll collector booths will take your plastic, which I guess just means that “manual collection” isn’t necessarily cash. And certainly not just “coin” as one rendering of point tolling calls it.

Then there are some screwy national numbers on traffic (p9): “Aggregate annual traffic volume in 1995 was almost three-quarters of a million vehicles for toll bridges... (Hold it: the George Wash in NYC, the Bay Bridge in San Fran, and a couple of Philadelphia bridges do three-quarters of a million PER DAY); over 300,000 vehicles for toll tunnels (Guys: the venerable NYC tunnels the Lincoln, the Holland, the Brooklyn Battery and Queens-Midtown do that DAILY) and over 2.5 billion vehicles for toll roads (7m/day - that one sounds plausible, but my now my confidence is a l’il shaken).” Someone there could perhaps have deployed a calculator: 750,000/365 = 2055 and 300,000/365 = 822? Is it really plausible that an average of 2055 vehicles use all the toll bridges and 822 vehicles use all of America’s toll tunnels each day? I’d wager you’d count many go past the TRB offices on 2-lanes of Wisconsin Av NW during a lazy lunch-hour.

GOOD STUFF: That criticism covers a few percent of the work. The great bulk of the report is accurate, I think, I hope, and clearly written. And useful. I’ve been covering toll roads fulltime for three years but I learned a lot from it. Many general notions I had were nicely quantified and sharpened up with detail and data.

The report says that three-fourths of toll transactions continue to be with cash. That must be 3/4 in number, because the big number toll roads like the Chicago and New Jersey toll facilities don’t yet have much ET. New York the largest grosser by far is over half ET already.

Some interesting points:

• tolls range from 33c to $12 with the average US toll $1.52 (They must have missed Miami and Dallas where there’s a ton of quarter tolls still including a whole bunch of new ones on the Pres Geo Bush Tpk)

• truck tolls are generally 4 times the car toll

• the average number of vehicle classes at toll facilities is 10 (I find that amazing, testimony perhaps to politicians butting in and doing favors for different groups.)

• the average toll agency only alters its tolls about every 7 years, a fifth of agencies have never altered their toll rates, but the largest, TBTA, has raised its every 2.5 years

• the average toll increase is 40%, but the most common is 22.5%

• there are toll facilities in 38 out of 50 states

The report has a nice history of tolling in America, useful separate chapters on variable pricing efforts and innovative financing. It is interesting on provisions made to abolish tolls when debts were paid off, and how in most cases new debt was needed to rebuild. The general tone is positive about the future of tolling: “Continued evolution in financing and institutional arrangements in parallel with an increased public understanding of the value of tolls in building supply and managing demand are likely to increase the importance of tolling as a strategy to meet the nation’s transp needs well into the next century.”

If you promise to use a thick black marker to blot out their definitional gibberish in par 4 p11, and add in on p21 Houston, S California and Toronto as the leaders in multi-lane highway speed ET, draw a cartoon of TRB honcho Bob Skinner counting cars on Wisconsin Av over the traffic numbers, and equip yourself with whiteout to correct a few other blemishes, I’ll recommend you get this report. Lots of good info nowhere else available. (“Tolling Practices for Highway Facilities”, Synthesis of Highway Practice 262, National Cooperative Highway Research Program, National Academy Press 1998, 54p $23 www.nas.edu/trb/index.html aarcher@nas.edu)