DELAWARE:Turnpike Plans All Highway Speed Tolling

Traveling south over the recently constructed cable-stayed bridge that hoists the highway up over the big-ship navigation channel of the Intracoastal Waterway that links Chesapeake and Delaware bays, DE-1 swings lazily right as you descend to a new mainline plaza set in the flat treeless countryside of central Delaware. On the straight a sign gantry directs E-ZPass Only vehicles to the left lane dubbed EXPRESS, and cash payers are signed to move right. The ET-only and cash lanes split about 400m (1300') before the centerline of the cash toll plaza and there is some 245m (800') of Jersey walling each side of the toll plaza in both directions of traffic. The highway speed toll lanes are presently fed by a single lane at the approach split and at the other end are again striped to down to a single lane before the merge with the cashpayers. There are 5-cash toll lanes each direction with space to go to 7.

The highway speed toll section has 11m (36') of pavement for a full shoulder plus 2-travel lanes each direction. The two directions are separated by 9m (30') of grass median. If the mainline of the highway (presently 2x2 lanes) is widened to 2x3 lanes – already provided for on the major bridges – 2 of the 3 lanes will feed directly into the highway speed toll lanes.

ET gantries are set beyond the cash toll plaza, because the canopy for the Biddles plaza had already been ordered when the decision was made to go to highway speed lanes and did not allow room for them alongside. There’s an antenna for each travel lane plus a third to catch lane straddling vehicles.

Each direction of traffic through the mixed toll lanes is catered to with a 8-channel ET reader and the highway speed lanes have a pair of 4-channel readers. Mark IV says that a preferred arrangement for future open road tolling will be new reader, called BADGER (noone seems to know what it stands for) which is specifically designed for the open environment of highway speed tolling in which vehicles move through the read zone on many different paths, given multiple lanes and shoulder.

The BADGER reader is being tested. It wasn’t available in time for Biddles Corner.

Vehicle classification is by axle number and Idris ‘smart loops’ installed in the pavement are doing an “excellent job,” officials say. So much so that they are considering scrapping treadles elsewhere for the loops procured from Peek Traffic, which use advanced signal processing to sense the metallic mass of axles. A downward pointing laser on the first gantry serves as a vehicle detector and separator.

Officials say the transponders (tags) are working to a very high standard. A few misreads seem to be from improperly mounted tags. Auto-carrier trucks with a car overhanging the cab of the tractor are getting a high rate of missed reads - apparently because the forward car blocks the line of sight between the antenna and the tag.

Like other Regional Consortium members the Delaware Turnpike is most unhappy with the imaging of violators, both low speed and high speed. MFS is only managing to deliver about 50% of humanly readable license plates, and more alarming, has not managed to achieve much improvement, they say. It is unclear how much of the problem is the cameras themselves – CRS units from the UK – which some maintain are less capable than other more expensive cameras. Other possible sources of the low image success rate could be lighting, transmission of the data, or signal processing.

So far however violators who simply blow through the highway speed lanes without a transponder are quite rare.

Biddles Corner plaza has a control room with a panoramic view of the plaza. Toll collectors do all their own counting. The plaza is slightly elevated so the toll building is two storeys with the lower level leading into a tunnel which houses utilities including central air ductwork to the toll booths, lane controllers, ETC readers. And it provides safe access to the toll booths via stairs. It is one of two mainline toll plazas on DE-1, the other being on the northern outskirts of Dover, and there are a couple of ramp plazas.

Delaware One Turnpike

DE-1 is being upgraded to full motorway standard for 80km (50mi) from just south of Dover to I-95 at Christiana DE. Its route hardly strays more than a mile from that of US-13 an existing 2x2-lane surface arterial, so it faces considerable competition from the free road.

DE-1 has been built piecemeal by a mix of bonds and federal and state gas tax money and stretches of it are untolled, other stretches are tolled.

The Dover toll plaza on the first section of DE-1 – from Dover north to Smyrna – opened Dec 93. It presently has 12 toll lanes, three of which are reversible. Gannett Fleming, the Delaware turnpike’s principal engineering consultants, are working on a scheme to rebuild the Dover toll plaza. Six toll lanes in the middle will be demolished to make room for the same 2x2-lanes highway speed tolling. Two manual toll lanes will be added each side for 2x5-lanes. Pete Wickwire who is in charge of the design says AASHTO/FHWA standards require 300m (1,000') acceleration for the manual toll payers to reach safe highway speed and merge into a highway with

105k/h (65mph) design speed traffic. At the Dover plaza this length of separate roadway will be quite expensive.

The Turnpike also plans to introduce highway speed tolling to its biggest toll plaza — the 20-laner on I-95 near the Maryland state line. Design of that will begin after the Dover plaza has gotten under way.

Work starts in the spring on the final 13km (8mi) of the toll road which will complete the motorway standard road to Dover. It is due to open late 2003. Electronic tolling started in Delaware Nov 11 98 at the mainline 20-toll lane plaza on the Delaware Turnpike (I-95) which averages 85k tolls/day, then at the Dover plaza on DE-1 Apr 6 99, the smallest tolling plaza at 20k veh/day.

Highway speed tolling started on DE-1 at Biddles Corner on Nov 17 99. About 30k veh/day are going through the plaza, and already about 10% with E-ZPass tags. Wilkins says the highway speed lanes have been “a huge sell” for electronic toll tags: “We’ve seen a real surge in demand. People have been coming in around the clock and for the first time we’ve had lines of people waiting to get them.” (Contact P J Wilkins 302 631 4000, PJWilkins@mail.dot.state.

de.us, Peter Wickwire Gannett Fleming 717 763 7211)

Robbers Beware!

At the new Biddles Corner toll plaza on the Delaware Turnpike’s new stretch of toll road on DE-1, I asked the toll collector: “Is Mr Wilkins in that building?” pointing to a likely administration building alongside the plaza.

“Mr Wilkins?” she said, wracking her brain for a moment.

“Director of Toll Operations, I think is his title,” I said trying to help.

Then she realized who I was after: “Oh yes, of course, you mean Peejay. Yes, he should be in there...just take the first exit and do a U-turn at the next interchange up there...”

P.J. Wilkins is a cheery hunk of a man, late 40s perhaps, earthy, businesslike, and about the last kind of person you’d want to meet there if you were robbing the place. With the strong, muscley figure of a weight-lifter or wrestler, head shaven like a soldier, casually dressed, he exudes the martial arts. (Does the ‘J’ stand for Jesse of Ventura fame, we wondered.) Only a few years back PJ retired from a career in the US Air Force special forces to go into tolling!

Though toll plazas rarely get robbed, at least by outsiders, the warrior’s mind turns to thinking through how his toll plazas can be made more difficult to assault. Varying armored car times randomly, concealing the armored car operations a bit better from surveillance... And on how to protect against theft from within... but of course with the transfer of transactions to E-ZPass accounts, the opportunity for misappropriation of funds shifts to hacker types in a customer service center upstate in Secaucus? Or at clearinghouse ops?

Wilkins is moving to supplement his system which monitors ET transactions on a screen with addition of a realtime display of camera images of violators, so the office there can see what is going up the line to violations processing in Secaucus. So they can adjust the camera systems as needed to get better pictures.