MON-FAYETTE EXWY PA:First Bill Acceptors and Unmanned Booths on a US pike

The mainline plaza at Haydentown on the Mason-Dixon leg of the Mon-Fayette Expressway (MFE), opening March 1, south of Pittsburgh PA, looks conventional enough – multiple toll lanes between jersey barriers, and multiple toll booths under a big canopy.

The toll booths have the normal three directional view (left, right and ahead) through waist-to-ceiling height windows with slatted blinds. Of dark brick and brown tinted double glaze, they are actually a bit wider than most toll booths – 1.8m (6') wide. Peeking inside you see they each come equipped with a touch screen toll terminal.

But there’s no toll collector’s window. The motorist’s attention instead is directed to a bright protruding yellow panel about 1m x2m (3’x6') set in the side of the toll booth, that has the mind numbing new millennium descriptor Automatic Multimode Machine (AMM). Costing $50k each, they are double-height machines with all functions duplicated for truck drivers and low vehicles, including pairs of (1) regular ACM-type coin throw baskets, (2) push-in slots for a magstripe charge card (3) a bill acceptor that will accept $1 and $5 bills (4) a receipt printer (5) a semi-circular section change dispensing bin (6) an intercom to talk to a tollster (7) an ‘out of service’ light.

These same AMM machines manufactured by TransCore Australia (formerly TSTI) are used there and in Asia to accept Visa, Mastercard and ATM cards and indeed are equipped to handle the ‘I-ain’t-got-no-money’ patrons by photographing their drivers license and issuing them a toll bill and prepaid envelope. Similar machines from French manufacturers Trindel and CS Route are commonplace in Europe. But, so far as we know, this is the first deployment in the US of a toll machine equipped with a bill acceptor, change-giving and self-swipe charge card capabilities.

The Mason-Dixon leg now opening from south of Uniontown to near the West Virginia line has the Haydentown mainline plaza with 6 toll lanes and 4 toll lanes at a pair of ramp plazas at the Rubles Mill Rd interchange. The toll plaza design was by Wilbur Smith with system integration and installation by TransCore. Tolling is based entirely on 10 AMM machines with coin, bill, chargecard and changemaking capability.

James Manderino of the Turnpike told us that the present plan is to have one toll collector on duty at all times at the mainline plaza. This officer will be there to check that all the equipment is working, and be available to respond to patron’s queries on the intercom system. The officer on duty will be classified a ‘toll collector’ but will function as a toll plaza attendant because normally the AMM machines will do all the toll collecting. If a machine goes down that toll lane will be closed. Only in exceptional circumstances of backups, or if there are problems with multiple machines will a toll collector be called in to take tolls from a toll booth. But just for those exceptional cases the toll booths have toll terminals and a sliding door.

Local reporters were asked by the Turnpike not to publicize the fact that there would be a lone toll officer on duty most times, for fear this might encourage holdups. (But they didn’t ask us to withhold such news. TRnl they said has a higher class of reader! We hope.)

Turnpike officials say they presently plan to use the bill accepting and change giving machines with one plaza attendant on other sections of the Mon-Fayette/Southern Beltway. There is no electronic tolling (ET) on the Mon-Fayette, but wiring has been installed to simplify addition of antennas.

The Turnpike is concentrating on getting ET up on the 17 interchanges of the eastern portion of the Mainline from IC-18 Harrisburg east through the Philadelphia area to the NJ line and on the Northeast Extension. This constitutes 64% of the Penn pike’s traffic and the aim is to have E-ZPass in operation for passenger vehicles here by the fall of this year. ET will not be implemented throughout the 750km (470mi) system, and for all classes of vehicles, until the end of 2003.

Mason-Dixon Link

The Mon-Fayette Exwy (MFE or PA-43) and its associated Southern Beltway (SB) constitute perhaps the most ambitious completely new highway system being built in any US metro area. These are new highways totaling 175km (105mi) in length and likely to cost $3.5b – located where no road has gone before. The Monongahela Valley traditionally relied on river barge and rail for freight. Workers just walked, or rode bicycles, since many lived within a mile of so of the steel mills, coal mines and other places of work. Homestead, Swissvale, Duquesne, West Mifflin, McKeesport, Clairton and Donora are all Mon Valley names famous from the days when Pittsburgh was the world’s steel capital.

Steel is a shadow of what it was, and mining is increasingly automated, but Pittsburgh itself has long since bounced back as a center of high technology, medicine etc. But the Mon Valley to its immediate east and south is among the poorest, most depressed parts of the state. The MFE has been pushed as a way to revive the economy of the valley towns. The road is expensive because of the rugged terrain requiring a huge amount of earthmoving and bridging, as well as dealing with coal mining subsidence. And most of it will not be financeable with tolls alone. State and federal gas tax money is providing most of the capital, the tolls being seen as covering little more than maintenance and operating costs – tolled roads, or toll-assisted roads rather than toll roads.

An exception may be at its far northern end where the MFE is a Y-plan, splitting at Dusquesne to make connections to I-376 and the area expressway network near downtown Pittsburgh in the west and to I-376 near Monroeville and the Mainline Turnpike in the east. In this area the top arms of the ‘Y’ form an alternative east-west route (as well as connections north-south) and could constitute a congestion-reliever to I-376 or the Parkway East, as the locals call it. As so often happens, the segment of road with the greatest potential traffic and toll revenues is also the most difficult to build. Real estate is expensive. Railroad right of way needs to be moved. Its routes encroach on developed areas, on churches, creeks and the riverfront. It faces major political obstacles, but several alternates being pursued carry promise.

For now construction of the MFE proceeds, not where the traffic need is greatest, but where there is local support and finance, but far less traffic. The first 10km (6mi) section (5 on the map) was opened in Oct 1990 – a spur off I-70 south to just beyond US-40 and called the California section. It has one modest mainline barrier plaza. Another 7km (4mi) Uniontown-Chadville section was built as an untolled road, opening Nov 92.

The Mason-Dixon leg is the southernmost part of the MFE and will extend from the present end of the Uniontown-Chadville section to I-68 in Morgantown WV. The Pennsylvania Turnpike has completed the $140m 12.5km (7.8mi) within its jurisdiction but its last work is a huge fill for a bridge that has its foot right on the West Virginia line. WVDOT has only just started construction of its 6.7km (4.2mi) portion which requires two major bridges and a difficult interchange at I-68 and PA-857. WVDOT’s original intent was not to toll their section and with this in mind the Pennsylvania Turnpike built its mainline plaza at Haydenstown with no tolling on its southernmost ramps at Gans Road.

Now faced with a commitment to find $115m for a road that will be used mostly by out-of-staters the WV legislators have passed a bill allowing a toll – which may support a bond issue. WV highway official Norm Roush says he expects the department will take advantage of the legislation to do some tolling, but details have not been worked out. Two thirds of the $115m needed is for the reconstruction of the I-68 interchange at the end of the Mon-Fayette. This will in effect be two ICs atop one another, with ramps for the local Lake Cheat residents and the Mon-Fayette interwoven.

And with tolls in WV the Penn pike will have to add a toll at Gans Rd, or a lot of traffic will just bypass the WV toll traveling Gans Rd/857.

The Penn pike section Gans Rd to Chadville, just opening, cannot expect more than 4k to 5k veh/day, officials say. It will make for safer driving, taking through traffic off PA-857, an all-purpose winding 2-laner. Only when the I-68 connection to the south and Uniontown to Brownsville segments are complete is it likely to attract even near-respectable traffic volumes.

Fine Road

The new section of the MFE is a fine piece of roadbuilding: 300mm (12") concrete pavement on top of 150mm (6") of a permeable asphaltic drainage layer with 2x 3.65m (12') travel lanes each direction and full depth rightside shoulder designed to temporarily carry one travel lane of traffic. The central median is 18.3m (60') accommodating grassed drainage swales and then an attractive central mounding or berm to prevent crossovers without the need for jersey barrier or guardrail.

There is some gorgeous bridgework. For example, Gans Rd overpass is acutely angled and needs 1.8m (6') deep steel plate girders. They curve in both horizontal and vertical planes and are integrally cast into the pier cap. That makes a beautifully cleanlined solid bridge and 1.8m (6') less grade separation, given that the skew plan swings the ends of that pier-cap over the inner lanes of the roadway below.

Engineers for this stretch of the MFE were Michael Baker company for design and Dick Corp construction management.

Closer in to Pittsburgh, the 27km (17mi) I-70 to PA-51 section now under construction has some even more rugged country to traverse. One pair of steel plate girder bridges over Mingo Creek gorge and PA-88 will be 77m (252') high – half as high again as the decks of most of the world’s suspension bridges like the Golden Gate or the Verrazano Narrows bridges (most of which have a deck for big ship clearance of about 52m 170'). This section also has to cope with gradual longwall coal mine subsidence.

You get a completely new sense of the countryside as you move along this spectacular road – distant views at one moment from the 40m embankments, and then a sense of the grandeur of the mountains as you pass into similarly deep cuttings. In more practical terms 70mph travel becomes safer and less hassle on the new expressway than 40mph travel was on the old road. When the other legs are complete, the whole Mon Valley and its forlorn ex-steel communities from the large university town of Morgantown right into the heart of Pittsburgh will be tied together as never before.

Innovative Toll Machines

The toll system on the MFE, like other extensions of the Pennsylvania system classifies vehicles by axle number and uses a treadle on entry and another on departure to count axles. A light curtain separates vehicles as they clear the lane. There is a red and green light and a patron message display. All toll lanes are gated with a highspeed gate by Magnetic. No license plate imaging is in place, but there is general video survelliance available to the plaza attendant, who also has a small office with views of both sets of lanes from the central utility building.

The plaza has no tunnel so the bill/coin machine vaults are located in the pseudo toll booths into which the multi-mode machines are fitted. If the single plaza attendant scheme at Haydentown is successful the Turnpike will probably implement it elsewhere on the Mon-Fayette Exwy/Southern Beltway and perhaps retrofit it on the Beaver Valley Exwy and Greensburg Bypass. It could also introduce them to other places with point tolling, such as is proposed for the western end of the Mainline and on the end of the Northeast extension.

Toll rates are being set at the Haydentown mainline plaza at 75c for 2-axle vehicles and an extra 75c per additional axle for $3.00 for a regular tractor-trailer. At the Rubles Mill Rd ramp plaza tolls are 50c for a car, plus 50c/extra axle. This amounts to about 6c/km (10c/mi) for a car.

Machines rather like this have been around for some years and the question arises why haven’t they been used elsewhere. One toll operations officer at another turnpike told us: “Throughput. You just couldn’t get sufficient cars past one of those machines for our system.” He said toll people have repeatedly looked at bill acceptors, but that so many of US bills, especially the $1, are so crumpled and lacking in body you’ll get jams and rejects. Moreover putting a bill in a bill acceptor mechanism leaning out the window of the vehicle is more difficult than standing at a soda or transit fare machine where both hands can be used. He says giving people a number of options in the lane will also increase the time they linger there.

Comment: (1) Almost every soda and snack vending machine in the US – an estimated 2 million of them – have bill acceptor mechanisms, and they seem to find them beneficial to business, so maybe we have an exaggerated notion of their problems (2) throughput isn’t everything (3) sometimes throughput is not even an issue.

It is notable that the PA pike has installed the multimode machines on a toll road where traffic is expected to be very light for several years – only 5k to 6k/veh/day. It is supposed to get into the teens-k/day once the links to I-68 in WV and a leg northward are open, but those are still low volumes. That’s where the AMM machine seems to make the most sense.

(Joe Agnello, Penna Pike 724 755 5262, Nigel Jones TransCore Aust 61 7 3275 4130 njones@saic.com.au)