SUNPASS:Complex Florida ET system lurches along

About three-quarters of the 410 toll lanes in the state-managed system are now wired and operational. This includes southeast Florida (Miami up to Palm Beach), the panhandle bridges, and west-central Florida (Hillsborough and Polk cos).

There have been problems getting the system to work adequately to support the 240km (149mi) trip toll system in place between Lantana (IC-93) just south of West Palm Beach near the Atlantic coast and Kissimmee/St Cloud (IC-242) on the outskirts of Orlando. In April last year when ET was starting in the southern part of the state, FDOT said the trip toll section would be running by the fall of 1999 but system integration problems affecting the whole system have led to deferral of placing ET on top of ticket tolls. Now the earliest the system seems likely to be completed is in February or March next year.

SunPass faces delays, too, achieving interoperability with the large independent ET system in Orlando. The Orlando Orange County Expressway Auth (OOCEA) has declined to go with SunPass, though its E-PASS is being designed for interoperability with the state turnpike system.

E-PASS is a traditional system with Type-2 transponders and it relies little on any write-back – just a bit of security code. Trip information and the account balance is held in central computers at OOCEA under a system developed and refined over several years. By contrast SunPass writes toll transaction data and an account balance to the tag each time it conducts a transaction with personal accounts. Or it tries to.

Missing some tolls

Officials say it is missing a significant number of tolls in heavy traffic because cars are already gone beyond write-range by the time the software is able to develop the message to send for transmission via the antennas in the lanes to the motorist’s tag.

“They developed a very complex concept and then employed people who had never done system integration before. It is not suprising they have problems,” is one official’s comment. Another was less kind saying: “They (FDOT) said all the other ET systems were dumb. Well this one (SunPass) is dumber.”

FDOT officials have claimed the losses are not great averaging under 1% but the system is specified to operate at 99.97% accuracy rather than 99.1% or 99.2% being achieved.

There are few complaints from motorists because they are getting the benefits of ET and the bonus of random no-toll rides.

Tampa Hillsborough Co Exwy Auth (THCEA) which presently has the FDOT Office of Toll Operations (OTO) collect its tolls is installing its own independent counting equipment in the lanes in order to have a data system independent of FDOT/OTO. FDOT says it will negotiate compensation with independent toll authorities during the development phase of SunPass and it has been paying compensation to some of the smaller tollsters.

Miami-Dade Exwy Auth (MDX) has not yet made a decision to develop its own ET system but officials there say they are keeping all options open and following what is happening elsewhere.

Orlando’s OOCEA went with an in-pavement transceiver/bumper-mounted transponder from Mark IV in 1995 - now an orphan system. It is now substituting a standard type 2 windshield-mounted TransCore/Amtech transponder/overhead reader system as a front-end for its TransCore developed system of lane controllers, and plaza and host computer system.

The new E-PASS tags are being readied for distribution to customers and the new SunPass-compatible system was due to go online December 2, with the in-pavement system due to be switched off at the same time. However TransCore/Amtech has been unable to supply sufficient tags (about 300k are needed) so the startup of the overhead system is being delayed. OOCEA has to develop the capability to write-back transaction and account data to SunPass tags using its system. TransCore will take about another two months to get the code written to accomplish this, so for a period of some weeks OOCEA will have to download files to FDOT daily so its antennas can do the write-backs when the vehicle shows up at their plazas.

Three extensions of the OOCEA’s toll roads – the Southern Connector and Seminole Exwy (on the southern and northern ends of the FL-417 Greeneway) and the Bee Line West (FL-528) are operated by FDOT and these need to go online at the same time as the Orlando pikes, requiring a high level of cooperation between two agencies with a very different approach to ET, that have been rather critical of one another. Tricky!

Different speed limits

FDOT and OOCEA were both operating dedicated ET lanes with a posted speed limit of 25mph (40km/hr). FDOT had a toll collector killed walking in front of a vehicle in a SunPass lane late last year. OOCEA has recently raised its posted speeds through dedicated ET lanes to 35mph (56km/hr) believing that its contract staff are thoroughly trained in safety. But FDOT officials think OOCEA was wrong to get out of step on speed limits through the lanes.

Anger at Amtech

There was anger at Amtech in mid-September when Rick Kelley a consultant with FDOT told local newspapers that “defective” software from Amtech was responsible for the system missing tolls and for the delays in extending ET to the trip-toll section of the turnpike W. Palm Beach to Kissimmee. In fact the difficult system integration with plaza host computers was Kelley’s job within FDOT, not Amtech’s job. The contract provides that Amtech only has to integrate its equipment at the lane level in its ET-only lanes, a rather straightforward task. Amtech had completed this work and passed its performance requirements months earlier. FDOT did not point to defective Amtech software in internal discussions. But Amtech was restrained by its contract from making any public comment. Amtech asked FDOT to correct Kelley’s statement. This never happened, allowing Kelley to pass the buck to Amtech for problems he and his programmers were unable to solve – difficult problems to be sure, arising from the need to make different generations of lane equipment to work with one another, but problems which lay outside Amtech’s control. (Contacts FDOT 904 488 5687, OOCEA 407 425 8606, TransCore/Amtech 717 561 2400)