E-tolling rolls out rapidly in New York

Dennis Keck, director of the New Jersey Dept of Transp. and a leading figure in NY/NJ highway matters, says electronic tolling is moving so fast in New York there could be a million tags in use by year’s end. He made the statement at the annual ITS America conference in Houston recently.

Few in the tolling business doubt that the industry is being transformed by the quiet electronic revolution in the oldest and richest redoubt of tolling. The New York/NJ metro area is a bunch of islands or pensinsulas linked together by tolled bridges and tunnels, six over and under the Hudson River operated by the Port Authority, and nine linking the City’s five boroughs and created in days of richer nomenclature by the Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority, now drackly named the MTA Bridges & Tunnels department. Those fifteen NY/NJ crossings take over a million tolls a day, garnering $1.4 billion revenues annually, the large profits going to subsidize the even larger losses suffered by the labor intensive, but politically preferred subway systems. In addition to the two New York crossing agencies there are three NY/NJ turnpikes — the New York State Thruway, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway (run by the New Jersey Highway Authority) — which last year rang up $825m in tolls. The five tolling authorities in the New York/northern New Jersey area brought in $2.2 billion toll revenues, close to 40 percent of the U.S. total.

The largest of the five, MTA/B&T, will have all its nine New York City crossings equipped for electronic transponders by the end of the year. Spokesman Josh Taylor says they have had to move up and increase their orders and that the installation has gone more smoothly and more quickly than expected: “It has performed way beyond our expectations.”

Electronic tolling went public last October on the Verrazano Narrows bridge, the suspension bridge on the entrance to New York harbor. Since then two bridges to the Rockaway peninsula west of Kennedy airport and the Throgs Neck bridge between Westchester Co. and Queens have seen electronic tolling introduced.

At the Verrazano, transponder tolling in rush hours is over 40 percent of total toll transactions and the Authority has about 110,000 tags out with the public. By year’s end when the Queens-Midtown tunnel, and the Triboro and Whitestone bridges are wired MTA/B&T expects several hundred thousand tags to be in use.

The New York State Thruway Authority which runs toll expressways north of New York City from Westchester County up the 500 mile length of New York State is rapidly installing electronic tolling.

NYSTA began electronic tolling on an interim basis in 1993 using the Amtech system that is dominant in the South. But last fall the Thruway began a changeover to the Mark IV technology that was selected in 1994 by an Interagency Group of nine New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania toll agencies as a standard. The Thruway authority has 140,000 transponders in use, mainly at its two toll barriers north of New York City at Spring Valley and the Tappan Zee bridge over the Hudson River and in the Albany area upstate.

John Cardillo spokesman for the Authority also uses superlatives to describe the success of electronics at their toll plazas. He is amazed at how fast e-tags have caught on and how smoothly the transition has been performed.

At the seven-lane Tappan Zee bridge that carries 120,000 vehicles a day 50 percent of transactions are now electronic and in the morning rush hour 75 percent, says Cardillo. Electronic tolling has been a major congestion reliever. It has virtually ended backups at the Tappan Zee plaza.

The Authority is running vehicles through one exclusive ETC lane at 1,000 an hour compared to 350 at its manual toll lanes. It has 5 mixed ETC and manual toll lanes and another 7 manual. The Thruway’s own staff engineers have done the systems integration of ETC. They claim to be the first toll road in the world to operate a read-write system on a closed and ticketed toll system (though the Kansas Turnpike with a new Amtech tag is almost simultaneous.)

Back in 1989 the Port Authority (PANY&NJ) pioneered electronic tolling on the Lincoln tunnel under the Hudson River for buses. PANY&NJ plans to take its whole system of 8 plazas at six crossings electronic as part of a joint turnkey procurement led by the New Jersey Turnpike.

Magro leads buy

That e-tolling buy for a total of 700 toll lanes is being led by Thomas E Magro, chief engineer of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. In addition to his NJ ‘pike and the Port Authority crossings, the New Jersey buy will cover two other New Jersey toll roads -- the Atlantic City Expressway run by the South Jersey Transportation Authority and the Garden State Parkway run by the New Jersey Highway Authority. The New Jersey consortium is considering tenders from four groups to design, build and operate a single customer service center and install ETC on the four agency facilities. Lockheed Martin and MFS Technologies lead two bidding teams. The other two are led by Chase Manhattan and Valley National Bank.

The involvement of banks in the NJ consortium is an interesting new aspect of the NJ Consortium project. Some officials see the possibility of electronic tolling being a platform for introduction of a broad-use smartcard, a bank card with a chip in it for managing stored value (magnetic stripe cards that proliferate in our wallets require online communications with a central computer.) Bidders are being asked to propose a smart-card reading toll transponder as an optional alternative to the regular self-contained electronic tag. It remains to be seen whether this will fly this time. If not it may fly later.

The New Jersey Turnpike at its northern end its traffic feeds directly into the Port Authority’s Hudson River crossings. And the Highway Authority’s Garden State Parkway, intersects the NJ Turnpike and is linked to the NY State Thruway. So interoperability will be crucial.

The NJ Turnpike-led purchasing consoritum expects to receive final proposals and award contracts this summer. The aim is to have the joint customer service center in operation by April 1997 for limited ETC operations, and to complete the installation on all four systems by March 1998, according to Thomas Magro. Few installations in the world are as complicated and large as this one. The customer service center and backroom operation is being designed so other area agencies can join.

Local experts say it is quite common for commuters in the NY/NJ area to do a daily commute of 100 miles to make several state border crossings and to use the toll facilities of 4 or 5 agencies in a single day. Commercial drivers make many more daily uses of muliple toll facilities.

Goin' induroprabull

In New York interoperability is already working. Motorists using the Tappan Zee and the Thruway’s toll plaza who cross the MTA/B&T Throg’s Neck bridge to get onto Long Island can make the trip with either a Thruway or a MTA E-ZPass tag.

Dennis Keck says ETC on the other side of the Hudson is going so well that there could be a million tags in use there by the end of the year. Clearly there’s a potential for several millions once the NJ-led consortium system is up in mid-1998.

The success of e-tolling in New York is having reverberations south and west. In the Philadelphia metro area the Delaware River Port Authority administering four toll bridges is part of the tri-state Interagency Group which adopted Mark IV technology. The same goes for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which will take the same technology to the borders of Ohio.

New England is getting a mix of ETC technologies, the Massachusetts Turnpike being in the process of installating a MFS Technologies system on the Boston Harbor tunnels and on the mainline of the turnpike, while later this year Maine will put in an AT/Comm system similar to the one in use on the large Illinois tollway system west of Chicago.

Delaware is another state so small that motorists using its highways often don’t tank up and hence don’t pay any state gasoline tax, and it generates major revenues fom tolls on the I-95 Delaware Memorial Bridge at the southern end of the NJ Turnpike. Like its neighbor Maryland it has made no E-toll contractual commitments. To the south of Maryland, Virginia has a Mark IV system on its Dulles Toll Road. Virginia had a nightmare procurement with extended litigation but since their system became operational mid-April, it has been well received. Several hundred tags are going to customers each day. The investor-built Dulles Greenway will be part of the same Fastoll Mark IV system shortly.

Maryland’s toll authority the Maryland Transportation Authority is currently considering ETC bids for its two harbor tunnels and the harbor bridge. Potential interoperability with neighboring systems was featured in the tender documents as a factor that would affect the rating of bids. With Mark IV technology to the north and to the south, Maryland would seem to require powerful reasons to choose a different system.

Just as MFS has set standards in the west, and Amtech in the south, Mark IV looks to have established technical hegemony in the mid-Atlantic. AT/Comm has a good, if small, base in Illinois. (Contacts by fax: Paul Manuel, marketing Mark IV 905 624 4572, Thomas Magro NJ Turnpike, NJ consortium 908 247 4420, Dennis Keck I-95 Coalition 609 530 8044)

1995 Toll Revenues

MTA Bridges & Tunnels $590m

Port Authority NY&NJ $777m

NY State Thruway $327m

New Jersey Turnpike $326m

Garden State Parkway NJ $172m

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