Clearinghouse for E-ZPass?

Anti-Reb jibes aside, the Virginians are right about one thing. They’ve got a neat ET model intra-state. Castle Rock handles all ET transactions for 3 separate tollsters (VDOT, the Gway, RMA) at 5 separate toll facilities. With the opening next year of the Chesapeake Bypass and the Richmonnd 895-Connector that Castle Rock operation will go to 4 tollsters and 7 toll facilities. That centralized operation achieves some scale economies and saves daily transfers of good and bad tag-list files between individual agencies and each agency sending a financial transfer to every other, a procedure which gets increasingly burdensome as the number of members of the E-ZPass Inter-Agency Group (IAG) increases.

Of course many tollsters are prepared to pay that price because they keep a degree of control over the ET operation, and a discretion in how they do things, that they are reluctant to cede to a central outfit. Castle Rock however manages to accommodate a variety of plans. As does Lockheed for the Triborough, the Thruway and the PANYNJ, and Chase Manhattan is doing for the NJ toll roads and Delaware. We seem destined to small evolutionary changes in present arrangements. Unless the IAG has a big new scheme for a central clearinghouse under wraps.