E-TOLL STANDARDS Australia goes 600k big on CEN

E-TOLL STANDARDS

Australia goes 600k big on CEN

Australia will be the first country to begin mass production of electronic toll equipment to the new European CEN standard. The Australian subsidiary of NEC has an initial $11m order for supply of 600,000 e-tags. The order comes from Combitech which has the toll system integration for Melbourne City Link, currently under construction.

City Link is a $1.3b inner city motorway (mwy) project that links three currently unconnected radial mwys and provides a near-in bypass of, and access/egress to, the central business district of Australia’s second city (metro pop 3.2m). The project involves mined and cut&cover tunnels of 3.4km and 1.6km, 3-lanes wide and 5km of elevated 2x3-lane roadway together with extensive widening and improvements along 22km of roadways. Point traffic volumes are forecast to range between 99k and 132k veh/weekday at 6 toll points with 660k point tolls to be registered in 2001 growing to 730k in 2011.

The group has not published trip forecasts but it seems likely to be at least 250k trips/day which suggests a volume over twice that of the world’s second automated toll road, 407-ETR in Toronto and some 8-times the first, 91-X in Calif. 91-X has a single-point toll system since it has no intermediate access or egress points. 407-ETR has 29 interchanges and tolls on a trip basis with e-toll and license plate read equipment at all entry and exit points and an entry-exit matching system to generate trip records.

By contrast Melbourne City Link is point tolling from toll gantries set over the mainline at 6 places between interchanges. 407-ETR is currently splitting its toll reads about 60/40 between transponders (e-tags) and license plate imaging. Melbourne by contrast is planned to be about 96% e-tags vs 4% license plate imaging, which accounts for the huge first order of 600k e-tags (vs 407’s first order of 100k e-tags).

CEN “better”: Salahdin Yacoubi, manager for electronic toll collection at TransLink Systems, the contracted operator told us he likes the CEN standard better than the North American system bid by Hughes (now Raytheon) TMS, though other factors, not least price, played a part in the choice. Yacoubi said the 5.8GHz backscatter system from Combitech provides a more directional and more easily controlled radio signal than an active 920 MHz system.

The North American system implemented in Toronto and the similar systems from Mark IV in New York and the mid-Atlantic states are built around the more demanding needs for transmitting longish messages for heavy trucks doing weigh station bypass and border crossings where an active transponder may have an edge. In Australia it is clear the simpler demands of account identification and electronic tolling make a basic backscatter or reflective system seem quite adequate.

The rest of Australia looks headed to follow Melbourne so long as the CEN system works properly. City Link itself is not expected to open until mid-99 but beginning this May there will be tests with an initial run of NEC-CEN transponders in Melbourne. 10,000 e-tags will be issued to motorists and they will be tested from temporary readers placed above arterials and untolled mwys.

A recent consensus seeking report by Phil Singleton Research says there is clear support for the European CEN standard among key agencies and toll operators. The report “Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) Standards Study” was conducted for ITS Australia and Austroads, a research and publishing group.

Though no formal announcement has been made, officials said it was considered recently at a meeting of the Australian Transport Council and was accepted by the state, federal and New Zealand transport department heads who meet in this consultative body.

There is no likelyhood of any effort to mandate standards but the pro-CEN report and the favorable response by governments seems likely to be a major influence on two critical e-toll selections to be made in Sydney later this year — for the state owned Harbour Bridge/Tunnel and for the investor owned Eastern Distributor project.

AT/Comm’s active system built to its proprietary standard is the only operational e-toll system in Australia. It is on the M2 mwy in Sydney and at the Gateway Bridge in the third city, Brisbane. The Harbour Bridge authorities have experimented with a locally designed low frequency read-only backscatter system. Two other toll systems M4 and M5 have used magstripe cards, but want to get rid of them because they say they are troublesome to patrons and costly to maintain. They are using proximity and touch tags as an interim device.

3 into 6 tolls won’t go: A fifth toll project, the Eastern Distributor that is under construction has been designed for manual collection with 3-lanes of traffic hitting a mere 6 toll-lanes at a staggered toll plaza in a space-constrained inner city environment. Officials there said it is quite likely they will not construct this undersized manual plaza if they think a Sydneywide e-toll standard can be agreed upon. They will go direct to automated tolling a la-407/City Link.

Singleton’s survey of leading decisionmakers found “the majority clearly favored the CEN standard.” The report suggests this is partly because of the perception that the US and Japan do not have standards. (The report incorrectly states that Japan is using low frequency when it has adopted the same frequency for e-toll as Europe, 5.8GHz. Japan’s standard has a more capable format with an active trnasponder similar to N.Am. By now N.Am is 98% of the way to a standard but when the Singleton survey was being conducted mid-97 the prospects for a standard looked poor.) But perhaps most important Melbourne’s choice of a CEN system over a N.Am system has influenced others there.

Singleton suggests that the next major e-toll system choice will be for the state owned Harbour Bridge/Tunnel toll complex, currently the largest toll facility in the country. Our conversations recently suggested they are likely to go CEN. Once they have committed, then the Eastern Distributor will almost certainly follow the state authorities. The Distributor will plug right into the Harbor tunnel approach at its south end. The Distributor will toll southbound whereas the Harbor Tunnel tolls northbound so interoperable equipment seems a must.

Rand Brown of Amtech, in Dallas TX, the world’s largest supplier of electronic toll equipment told us he’s “delighted” Melbourne chose CEN and that the rest of Australia seems likely to follow. “This is a terrific boost for CEN,” he said of their order for 600k CEN tags. “It is just what is needed to launch CEN.”

Amtech has said it will build to the CEN standard and has CEN prototypes manufactured but no orders as yet. “They are sitting on the shelf waiting,” he said, “but we can manufacture anytime we get an order.” With a large installed base using its proprietary backscatter technology, Amtech is selling a family of transponders from read-only batteryless tags to the more capable Intellitag. Amtech is dominant in the South of the US, big in Latin America and in Asia, with several installations in Europe. In Australia it has a “big bunch” for tracking on rail cars. (Contact ATC 61 62 274 7851)