ELECTRONIC TOLLING:Triborough Transformed

Nowadays known as MTA Bridges and Tunnels (MTA B&T) it is run by Michael C. Ascher, an engineer from the transit side of MTA, and before that from nuclear power. Ascher and his colleagues work out of a modest gray 3-story office building, the Robert Moses Building, located in the shadow of the elevated Manhattan plaza of the Triborough bridge on Randall’s Island in the East River.

Coppola got himself an E-ZPass tag to use during his New York stay and thought it was something amazing. When he visited the Moses building two months ago, he immediately chatted about E-ZPass and asked Ascher: “When are you going to bring E-ZPass to San Francisco?”

Caltrans of course is making its own efforts with MFS to implement electronic tolling (ET) on the Bay area bridges closer to Coppola’s homeground, but it is striking that it is New York City’s ET implementation that has become so famous – and envied by guys who live alongside Silicon Valley.

The success of E-ZPass has transformed the public image of the MTA B&T with New Yorkers too. The improvements are readily observed.

Take the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (BBT), where traffic volume is up 16% this year while congestion is way down. Ed Wallace the general manager of the BBT is obviously proud of the way this tunnel now operates. He says that a combination of E-ZPass technology and special provision for bus/HOV have dramatically increased the capacity of the crossing.

The whole place looks a lot better than I recall it when I lived in New York 17 years ago. Then trash blew around and the Triborough facilities had a generally rundown appearance. It certainly isn’t Scandinavian neat-and-tidy yet, but a lot cleaner. And the people there look as if they care for things. They seem to quite enjoy their work from the chatter around their office and the change rooms, and from their general demeanor. A happy crew.

For about 40mins Jan 20, I stood with Wallace at the toll plaza on the Brooklyn end of the tunnel watching the evening rush hour traffic emerging from Manhattan on its way to Brooklyn and Staten Island. The longest queue I saw was six vehicles. There were many straight shots through, and short lines of two or three vehicles now and again, with 40 to 50mph traffic coming up out of the tunnel then rolling through toll lanes at 10mph, a few stopping for a few seconds. No congestion worth the name.

New gates (from the German company Magnetic) of aluminum tube with a thick red foam jacket to make them more visible whip up in a fraction of a second when the system gives them the Go, then descend more slowly, often the procession of vehicles being dense enough to keep them from returning to the full down position for several passes. Two-thirds of the traffic out of Manhattan was traveling through five E-Zpass lanes, the other third through four attended lanes. Three lane officers in bright orange vests stood hovering near the reverse direction bullnoses of the toll islands on the ‘out’ end to help any motorists with E-ZPass problems.

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (BBT), the longest vehicular tunnel in North America at 2.8km (9117') competes with the untolled Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges as a major route between the Wall Street area of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and Staten Island to the south. Gen. Manager Wallace says the BBT is attracting more traffic because with E-ZPass and associated changes that they’ve made with the state DOT, it now offers a substantial time savings compared to the free East River bridges: “They can get through in 4 or 5 minutes now compared to 15 or 20 minutes previously. Our customers now get a much better deal for the $3.00 E-ZPass toll. That’s for commuter cars. We are helping the buses even more.”

Busway HOV

About 900 buses use the BBT daily, all equipped with E-ZPass. The buses, and vans, have also been helped by an HOV lane along the elevated Gowanus Exwy on the southern morning rush hour approach to the BBT. It carries about 1300 veh/hr, about a fifth buses. Michael Ascher says that one of his greatest delights was seeing bus passengers giving the thumbs up as they sped through a toll plaza soon after the E-ZPass/HOV arrangement was instituted: “If we got any hand signal before that it was not that, I can tell you.”

Used to trips of 40 to 60 minutes between Staten Island and Manhattan they now regularly make it in 20 to 25mins in rush hours. They got reports of busloads of passengers giving their driver a standing ovation as the buses sped through, so dramatic was the improvement in the Staten Island-Lower Manhattan journey.

At the BBT Ed Wallace’s people run three travel lanes inbound (one tube runs two-way traffic) in the morning and have up to 6 E-ZPass and 5 cash toll lanes operating. In the less severe, more spread afternoon peak they run up to 5 E-ZPass and 4 cash toll lanes out of the tunnel. They can run 1,000 veh/hr through an ET lane, twice what they used to run through automatic coin machine lanes with tokens and four times the manual collection lanes.

The BBT plaza consists of 11 original toll lanes all of which will be wired for ET, so they can be operated ET, or cash. Five of these are regularly reversed am vs. pm. Two satellite plazas of 2-lanes each (cash) give the plaza a total of 15 toll lanes. Wallace says it is up to the plaza supervisor to make decisions about how many lanes to run, when to switch directions at the reversible lanes, and when to start and end the two way operations in the southern tube: “I don’t believe in rigid rules. I expect the plaza supervisor on duty to respond to the traffic as they find it on the day, and to make the adjustments needed to keep traffic flowing. They have to have the power to make those decisions. They are responsible for keeping the customers moving.”

The 6-lane elevated Gowanus Exwy, which also picks up the Queens-Brooklyn Exwy, links the BBT a distance of 10km to the splendid Verrazano Narrows bridge, another MTA crossing, which spans the mouth of New York Harbor and joins Brooklyn to Staten Island. It is a double deck bridge, 6 atop 6-lanes, with the longest suspension span in the US (1.3km 4260'). The toll plaza which only tolls southbound onto Staten Is collects a $7 roundtrip cash toll from cars, charges general E-ZPass customers $6 and registered Staten Is residents $3.20. It has to deal with separate traffic flows from the two separate levels of the bridge. The first arrangement of 21 toll lanes was a fourway grouping - 6 Cash, 5 ET, 5 Cash, 5 ET lanes. But experience showed there were imbalances between the two groupings and so they changed the plaza to 6 Cash, 10 ET, 5 Cash. Frank Pascual of MTA B&T says this rearrangement, allowing a better balancing of the ET lanes, made a big difference to traffic flow through the Verrazano plaza and was probably another factor contributing to faster trip times in the afternoon peak.

Jewel in crown

Michael Ascher says ‘invisible construction’ or night-time work to rebuild decks of bridges and to redo old tunnels has been a major managerial challenge the past few years. He’s proud that they have found ways to do hundreds of millions of rebuild without overmuch disruption of traffic. He’s glad that local residents and affected people pushed the agency to look at different ways of doing jobs, because the back and forth did result in better jobs. But he says “the jewel in the crown” is the success of E-ZPass, which was adopted by the public with a speed and an enthusiasm that was “beyond our wildest expectations.”

“We’re at 68% commercial traffic and 62% for passenger cars weekdays. Major rush hour delays at our facilities are a thing of the past. We seldom make the daily traffic reports any more, our facilities run so smoothly. And what I am quite excited about is that it isn’t just commuters who are doing better but holidayers and visitors. New York is becoming a much better and more pleasant place to visit because we keep people moving in the holiday season as well.”

The MTA B&T’s heaviest volumes are now on summer weekends and on holidays such as Mothers Day and Thanksgiving — northern NJ people going to the Long Island beaches, people visiting relatives. Ascher who lives in northern NJ and whose mother was in Queens says that one Thanksgiving back in the early 80s congestion on the Throg’s Neck bridge was so bad he and the family gave up trying to make it to his mother’s place: “We turned around, found a telephone and told her ‘Sorry we simply can’t get there, the traffic’s too bad.’ We had a Thanksgiving of hamburgers at home, quite a letdown.”

Delays of an hour and more were common pre-E-ZPass. The worst delay during 1998 Thanksgiving was at one crossing when for less than an hour the delay was 20mins. Ascher says the agency used to get scores of phone calls and mailbags full of complaints about delays, especially after holidays: “This year we got nothing. We used to have legislators sponsoring bills to drop the tolls on heavily traveled holidays. Not anymore because toll collection doesn’t delay traffic.”

“Without question E-ZPass is the most extraordinarily positive thing that has happened to regional transportation in New York in many decades,” says Ascher.

But he says it was a struggle. They made mistakes. The worst was the toll increase $3.00 to $3.50 in the middle of ET being introduced. The extra change that had to be given by toll collectors seriously slowed the manual lanes, and caused queuing which often blocked access to the ET lanes.

Mistakes

“Never ever do a toll increase simultaneously with a major change like ET. That’s the first lesson,” says Ascher. Next mistake was to announce the increase ahead of time: “People hoarded tokens and so they didn’t want transponders at first because they had huge stockpiles of tokens they wanted to work off.”

At the end of ’95 the overall MTA bosses (MTA runs most of the rail and buses in New York) decided on the toll increase to raise money for the authority’s loss-making rail operations in disregard of the impact on the toll facilities (Our words–TRnl).

The third mistake, Ascher says, was to introduce some ET-only lanes too early – ahead of there being sufficient ET

customers to keep the lanes busy. Initially they thought that ET-only lanes could be introduced when ET penetration was 10 to 15% - a number suggested by consultants. In practice they found it didn’t work well until about 20% traffic was ET.

“We really got slammed. Horrible press. We had messed up on the Throg’s Neck (bridge). The Verrazano and the smaller crossings had been fine. Quiet. No one much noticed. Then when we had the combination of new E-ZPass, the toll increase and backups on the Throg’s Neck and a few people criticizing us, and everyone slammed E-ZPass. The Mayor was good. He said ‘Give them time.’ We said ‘Sorry, we’ll rearrange things.’ It is tough maintaining a commitment through a period like that, when everyone is beating up on you. David Letterman helped a lot. And a young New York Times reporter who had been out of New York and came back and she said: ‘Hey this works.’ Getting a bit of positive comment like that, and Letterman lightening up people, seemed to change attitudes. People wanted to try it. We had turned it around. Suddenly it seemed to take off. Everyone wanted it. Orders just poured in. And didn’t stop for two years. Sometimes I think we are supplying the whole world with E-ZPass.”

Ascher and those of his staff we talked to were adamant that ET-only is the way to go. Unlike most other toll agencies at the MTA B&T they don’t ever operate a mixed lane - ET/cash or ET/automatic coin lane. They scrapped over 100 modern coin machines to keep their toll collection payment options starkly simple. Either the patron (1) uses ET in an ET-only lane or (2) pays cash to a collector in a Cash lane. No other option.

They think that strictly segregating ET users from non-ET traffic is essential to the smooth operation of their plazas. They say that segregation accounts in part for the rapid growth and high market share they have achieved for ET. It helps give substance to what David Letterman the late night TV talker called the E-ZPass Club, a special deal for special people. And that it makes for smoother flowing traffic. People know what lane they have to be in, and on several facilities they have ET-only travel lanes over their bridges to keep traffic separated.

MTA B&T has put out 1.5m tags almost a third of the ET tags in north America, the first in the world to go over a million, and it isn’t finished. At times in 97 and early 98 over 2,000 a day were going out. Sales of 7,000 a week continue.

Ascher says it wasn’t easy. He’s been with the ET program from its inception in 1991, whereas most other toll agency heads have changed once or twice. It has been difficult keeping the many agencies together, he says through changes of leadership. From the beginning, the project was to be a regional one to provide interoperability. Each agency had to give to accommodate the different needs of others.

MTA B&T itself could have made do with simple read-only tags because of its relatively slow speed urban environment. Most of its lanes are 11 feet. And its insistence on gates on all toll lanes gives it control over motorists speed. But Ascher says it has always supported read-write tags as the necessary technology for the regional group. The Inter-Agency Group (IAG) as it was called, included several toll roads, notably the New Jersey Turnpike and New York State Thruway both of which toll mainly by trip and for which it is very important to be able to ‘write’ entry data into the memory of the tag, which can then be ‘read’ on exit to perform the function of an old ticket. The understanding among the heads of seven original toll agencies was they would always be prepared to ‘give’ individually for the good of the group, that they would set common requirements, jointly select a system and build interoperability.

At first it was difficult to get vendors to take the IAG seriously, Ascher says. They couldn’t get serious proposals. Then, when it was made clear they were not going to buy separately they got proposals. But the first tests of tags in 1993 were a failure. Neither Amtech nor Mark IV could meet the standard of accuracy set by the IAG technical committee —99.95% accuracy in transponder reads and zero cross-reads (billing the wrong guy). A year later after the two bidders had refined their equipment both companies passed in a second set of tests. The decision to choose the newcomer to the business Mark IV over the established Amtech took a meeting of the CEOs that started at 9am and went late into the evening: “We exhaustively talked everything out. Everyone had a different angle to it. We talked through it all and reached a consensus for Mark IV’s approach to the technology.”

Integration tough

The ET itself works very well, says Ascher, though he is irritated by the continuing need to issue special external tags for vehicles with metal oxide windshields. They get damaged in parking lots and garages, and vandalized, and they are more work to install. If only the manufacturers would cooperate with a metal-free ‘window’ on the windshield, all the tags could be interior, he says. (GM and PPG the leading windshield company say it is happening, and the major problem remains windshields of

discontinued models.)

Ascher says system integration at the plazas was a ‘nightmare.’ Even now it is not completely behind the authority. The system integration job by Dallas-based Amtech (now a sub of Intermech) has still not reached the stage where it can do final acceptance tests, more than two years after the last of the nine crossings came on line with E-ZPass (Dec 96) and some 39 months since they first started taking e-tolls (Oct 95) and nearly five years after contracts were signed. There have been constant refinements to the system, and upgrades being done. However the final tests should begin in a month or so, Ascher told us.

He says: “We set high standards and we’re going to meet them. You know very well, it’s the system integration, the backroom stuff, programming that is the toughest thing anyone can undertake. It is very complex relating the plaza architecture to the lane controllers, and to the toll registry system. It is a horrendous software job. It is tough getting the programmers they need. It’s the guys who created the Y2K problem in the first place. Now a lot of them have run off and are making their fortunes doing Y2K fixes in other industries.”

Ascher quickly moves upbeat: “But I can’t imagine what this business would be like without this technology.”

He says that not only has it eliminated plaza queues, and increased capacity at the crossings, but “people just love it.” And he says it saves the authority $15m a year. 200 toll collector positions have been eliminated through attrition, about a third.

He praises his staff for an enormous effort, and says the labor union too was “great.” And they praise him, at least the staff we got to speak to.

Ascher collected tolls for a while when he was studying engineering at City College of New York back in 1962. He has the walls of his office covered with mementos, both positive and negative, framed tabloid front page of the New York Post slamming the Triborough, and positive pieces. Lots of photos. One is a picture of 19 year old Ascher in his new uniform, police style cap on his head, whistle in his mouth, in his college days. He confides that his mother was prouder of him when he got that uniform 36 years ago, and collected tolls at a toll booth, than when he got big appointments later to manage things. (Contact Frank Pascual 212 360 3065)