GEORGIA:Robbery, ET System Glitch, UPS outage, Violators etc.

The toll collectors handed over cash drawers and coin-change, after one of them, a woman has declined and had the muzzle of the gun thrust hard into her stomach. As the robbers placed and poured money into the plastic bags there was a chaotic scene in the lanes as several bags burst from the weight of coins and the contents clattered and spilled over the pavement outside the toll booths.

The robbers took off in the car which had been stolen, and then abandoned it only a short distance down the toll road, presumably for another getaway vehicle. They left more spilled coins inside the abandoned car. Pictures of the robbery were captured on the pike’s security video camera – a compressed or partial frame video system – but apparently the pictures have not been of good enough quality to identify the men. There have been no arrests. Information on the money the robbers actually got is not being released.

Mystery Bug

Early October the GA-400 service center got a growing volume of calls from electronic toll (ET) tag patrons saying they were getting a red light even though their accounts were in order. Lane controllers were not receiving correct updates of account status. Deputy administrator Terry Rogers says the system ceased downloading updates of valid account numbers to individual lane controllers and they were therefore sending incorrect signals to motorists’ ET tags.

She says that they have made software changes so that the lane controllers now actively poll the central host computer for updates though the previous system in which the host computer simply downloaded the updates from time to time had worked apparently without a problem for six years. She says there is no apparent explanation for why the system malfunctioned when it did - whether the software encountered a rare clash of code, or whether something got ever so slightly corrupted by a slight electrical spike. No hardware problems could be found.

For several hours people calling in to the turnpike were told to “Sorry, please just ignore that red light, we’re having system problems.”

A local radio station also broadcast news of the malfunction.

Then over the Columbus Day weekend the central system UPS went down and the host computer had no backup available in the event of an electrical outage. Routine maintenance had been overlooked, but fortunately there was no outage before they got to it.

Violations Gotten Down

At IBTTA Terry Rogers, assistant administrator of the Georgia State Toll Auth (GSTA) described how two years ago violations in the highway speed ET lanes were getting out of control. Violations had risen to 4% and word was getting out that you could away with bolting through the pair of open road ET-only lanes on the left side of the toll plaza and not be caught. They had cameras but a cumbersome system and the staff could only review about 10% of the violation pictures being taken. Violation notices were only being sent to about 3% of violators.

The state auditor was on their backs, and properly so, says Rogers, because violations were in danger of spiraling out of control, and they were unable to reconcile their traffic numbers and toll revenue. An in-house team was formed to completely redesign the whole toll enforcement and violations processing system. They discovered that 60% of the ‘violators’ were patrons with ET accounts, who for one reason or another had a non-working tag. So they instituted a system for segregating e-tag ‘violators’ from real violators. They automated their link to the state motor vehicle registry so that instead of being able to gain names and addresses of the owners of only 200 license tags per day they have the capability to access 30,000/day. They now convert all violator images into JPEG files and review 100% of them instead of 10%.

New Violation System Developed

They have developed a new violation notice with the help of Anita Lustig of CTP Graphic Solutions. This prints a “Gotcha picksha” of the violator’s vehicle at the toll plaza together with time and date stamp on the violation notice to discourage “I wasn’t even in town that day” kind of challenges. Software to automate the whole process was written by Yousif S Abouharb, systems manager at GSTA.

Rogers says once they had a credible system in place mid-98 they mounted an advertising campaign with radio spots and newspaper ads and erected signs on the approaches to the toll plaza, warning potential violators they’d be prosecuted in future.

The result of the whole effort: $600k/yr extra revenue, she calculates, and a violation rate now running at 0.13%, about a 30-fold reduction. (Contacts Rogers 404 760 5892, Abouharb 404 262 2159 Lustig CTP 770 652 3266)

BACKGROUND: GA-400 Toll Road is a 10km (6mi) 2x3-lane facility which opened in Aug 93. GA-400, the free road, 50km (32mi) in length and serving the fast growing suburbs north of Atlanta ended at the I-285 circumferential highway. The GA-400 Toll Road extends GA-400 inside the I-285 belt and links southward to I-85 providing a straight shot into the CBD (see map p8.) With expensive right of way and a metrorail reservation in the middle it cost $270m ($4.5m/lane-km, $7.2m/lane-mi) and was financed with a mix of revenue bonds and federal and state grants. Traffic is about 110k veh/day, 125k weekdays. The toll plaza has 18 lanes: 6 coin machine onlys, 8 attended coin machine lanes to give change, and 4 ET-only open road lanes, where, Rogers says, most of the traffic goes through at “about 80mph.” The system uses Amtech e-tags including the advanced Intellitag. 83k e-tags are on issue with 63k ‘Cruise Card’ accounts. 36% of transactions are electronic.