Violators Juss Flyin by in Okie

OKLAHOMA

Violations in open toll lanes

The Oklahoma Turnpike (OTA) has probably had open road electronic tolling longer than anyone in the world, having started in Sept 1991. Earlier examples of e-toll had been implemented as a retrofit to existing toll plazas and were either gated or roll-through. But in Oklahoma with the design of three new turnpikes the 15km 7-interchange Kilpatrick in the north of Oklahoma City, and two rural turnpikes the Cherokee east of Tulsa and the Chicasaw in the rural south, the mainline barrier plazas were designed with the manual collection off to the side so that e-tag vehicles could fly right through in the mainlanes without slowing.

Mary Kay Audd at the OTA says that the high speed tolling worked well once the transponder supplier Amtech beefed up the e-tags batteries, but that there has been a slightly growing problem of toll evaders without transponders simply bolting through. The toll evasion rate she says has been about the same in the e-toll (PIKEPASS) lanes as in the unattended coin machine lanes — 5%, which on the Turnpike’s revenues of $110m in 1996 is about $6m a year. That is after sifting out malfunction ‘violations’ where for example the patron does feed the coin machine money but the coins hangs or where a toll transponder is read and the e-toll account is debited but only after a violation has been indicated in the system and a picture taken. This happens occasionally in very high speed passes, Audd says, and usually if the transponder is not properly mounted.

For several years the pike has got by with a combination of patron willingness to “do the right thing” and bluff. Enforcement policy consisted of occasionally catching people with a camera and sending them a stern letter demanding payment. A surprising number, something over 90%, Audd says, simply paid up.

But it was really a bluff, she says, because toll evasion was not a traffic or criminal offense and there was no workable way to follow-up against those that ignored the stern letter. Civil proceedings would cost too much.

All it would have taken to open up the turnpike to rampant bolt-throughs was a single newspaper expose of the bluff involved in that letter of demand. So recently the Turnpike persuaded the state legislature to pass a law giving it effective sanctions to collect unpaid tolls. Titled the Electronic Toll Collection Act, it came into force Oct 1, and provides for an administrative fee of $15 for each mailed demand-for-payment and progressively increasing charges for multiple and unpaid tolls, with provision for an eventual block on car license tag renewal.

The OTA has 907km of toll road consisting of 10 pikes with 209 interchanges and sees 3.2b vehicle-km travelled on it annually. It has point tolls usually at a mainline plaza somewhere near the middle of the pike and with ramp plazas or trumpet IC plazas. It does 190k toll transactions each day charging an average 6.3c/km for cars. 40% of its tolls are collected via PIKEPASS read-only e-tags from Amtech and it employs 279 staff in toll operations. There are 337k e-tags out with patrons and 187k e-tag accounts. The cash toll is about 10% more than the e-tag toll. E-tags are distributed from two turnpike stores but it now has about 40 agents selling at shopping centers.

The turnpikes link the two major cities Oklahoma City and Tulsa and the main link with St Louis and the east and provide a major part of rural road in the eastern half of the state, which a total population of only 3.3m. The only mwy standard highways other than those of the turnpikes are I-40 east-west and I-35 north-south intersecting in Oklahoma City. (Contact Mary Kay Audd OTA 405 936 3607)