E470 in Colorado to study all electronic toll collection - cashless tolling

E470 may be the second established US toll system after Texas' NTTA to do away with cash toll collection. The board of the E470 Public Highway Authority (E470PHA) Sept 13 heard a proposal from staff for a move to all-electronic tolling (AET). Wilbur Smith Associates will produce a report by December.

AET will involve tolling by transponder for regular users of the road as now. Instead of cash being paid to toll collectors at toll booths or to coin machine baskets the tollroad will use cameras to identify vehicles and bill them - video tolling.

Executive director Ed DeLozier who started in the toll business as a toll collector himself (New Jersey Turnpike 1973) told the board that AET is "the way of the future." There would be significant savings de Lozier said though the study was needed to put precise numbers on that.

The average cost of collection of a cash toll is about three times the cost of an electronic toll – 25c to 30c cash vs 8c to 10c transponder, according to a fact sheet distributed to the board.

DeLozier also cited safety advantages in AET which eliminates the cash toll plazas as sites for rear-end collisions.

The I-25 HOT Lanes immediate north of downtown Denver demonstrate the success of the concept, he said.

E470 75km (47mi) long forming an eastern half-belt around the Denver area opened in stages between 1991 and 2003 (most 1998-on). It was built with open road tolling at 2+2 lanes through the middle of four of its five mainline toll plazas (Plaza A is 3+3). The mainline plazas also have three cash toll lanes each direction with toll booths and collectors.

The tollroad also has automatic coin and transponder toll lanes - no booths at all - on ramps at sixteen interchanges (32 ramp plazas). At seven of the interchanges there is just a single toll lane on the ramps with both automatic coin machine (ACM) and transponder reader. Five more interchanges with ramp tolls are planned when nearby development justifies them.

72% of 165k/weekday toll transactions (145k/day) are currently by transponder which is brandnamed EXpressToll. Looking at the E470 website you'd think at a glance it is all-electronic already. While the site focusses on selling you a transponder you have to search deep to find any information about cash tolls.

Point flows along the expressway (2005 T&R study) vary between 14.8k/day at the far northern end near the Northwest Parkway to 19k just north of I-70. South of I-70 they are higher mostly 23k to 35k. The far south gets up to 45k. The heaviest traveled southern portion had third lanes opened in 2005 and third laning will likely need to proceed roughly counter-clockwise for the next decade and 4th laning thereafter. Bridges are being built now for 4+4 lanes. So any move to go to all electronic tolling will probably provide gantries for 4+4 lanes.

Traffic and revenue forecasts are based on the population of the corridor in 2005 of 627k projected to grow to 797k (27%) by 2015 and 1,103k (76%) by 2030. Base case transactions are forecast to rise from 149k in 2007 to 242k (62%) in 2015 to 373k (150%) by 2030.

Trucks are about 5% of traffic.

Revenues would grow: $81m 2005, $197m 2015, $507m 2030.

Savings from going to AET would be the costs of 110 toll collectors, coin machine maintenance and cash handling. Expenses involve demolition of the cash lanes and other toll plaza modifications, a beefing up of the camera system and image handling presently used for violations, major new software, plus a larger customer service staff online. Questions to be answered are the effect on tolls collected and traffic.

DeLozier said one downside of AET would be the human face of the tollroad being lost - the toll collectors, who he called their "ambassadors."

But sticking with the present system has problems. The ramp tolls are presently mostly 75c for cars, about the maximum that automatic coin machines can sensibly handle with the quarter the largest circulating coin in the US. Many toll agencies in the US find toll collectors better at handling a dollar toll than coin machines, but it would be impossible to justify the expense of putting booths and collectors on the E470 ramps.

Cash collection on the mainline limits the location of downstream ramps. The need to avoid weaving of highspeed traffic through the ORT lanes across the slowspeed cash lanes has led to a design of proposed bypass lanes around Plaza D - an expense that would be avoided by a move to AET. (see diagram nearby)

Ed DeLozier in a presentation to his board joked that unneeded cash lanes at the mainline plazas might be concessioned out:

Lane 4: Starbucks?
Lane 5: Lamar's Donuts?
Lane 6 (wide lane): Hero Sandwiches?

NW Parkway too

If E470 went to AET then the Northwest Parkway at the far northern end of E470 almost certainly would follow. The E470 public highway authority already conducts toll collection for the NW Parkway and it would make no sense for such a small operation to now set up its own toll collection. It has one mainline and two sets of ramp plazas.

see http://www.e-470.com

Precedents elsewhere

The first major cashless or AET tollroad in North America and by far the largest is 407ETR in Toronto Canada which has 493 AET toll lanes at 193 ramp sites at 43 interchanges over 108km (67 miles) and does 315k transactions a day. Transactions there are each based on a pair of reads - reads of each vehicle first at entry and then at exit ramps where the toll equipment is located.

91 Express lanes has been transponder only from the beginning (Dec 27 1995) as are other toll lanes projects in San Diego (I-15), Houston TX, Minneapolis MN Z(I-394), Denver CO (I-25), and the Westpark Tollway in Houston TX.

The first major AET tollroad in the US is SH121 north of Dallas where transponder and video tolling are being used. Florida's Turnpike is doing AET on the elevated reversible express lanes in Tampa.

North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA) which operates two major tollroads and three smaller toll facilities in the Dallas area is going to AET over the next three years. It will likely be the first complete system conversion to cashless tolling in the US.

PANYNJ which operates six toll crossings NY-NJ including the huge George Washington Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel is studying the end of cash collection with detailed consultants' reports on how it will be done. The formal commitment has not been made yet.

Florida's Turnpike has a policy of building no new cash toll lanes and is working on a steady move toward open road tolling with cash phasing down.

Maryland's new Inter County Connector tollroad on which construction is beginning next year in Montgomery County north of DC will be AET.

Melbourne City Link and WestLink and a couple of other tollroads in Sydney, Santiago Chile's three tollroads, Germany's nationwide Toll Collect, Austria's Go Boxes, Trans Israel Highway, Singapore ERP, London and Stockholm's central area congestion tolls are other examples of all electronic tolling/no cash.

More general decline in use of cash

Cash is of declining significance in the US economy generally with payments at supermarkets, gas stations, fastfood increasingly done by use of cards which perform an electronic funds transfer. Cash is increasingly relegated to illicit transactions involving illegal drugs, sex, tax avoidance transactions etc.

Terminology and stages of electronic tolling

1. Electronic tolling added to regular toll lanes

The first stage for most tollroads starting in 1989 was the retrofit of electronic tolling (ET) in existing toll lanes in conventional stop-to-pay toll plazas with rows of toll booths between each lane and a large canopy overhead. This allows mixed mode tolling in which motorists with cash can pay a toll collector or throw coins in a cash basket, or if they have a transponder can drive straight through. But there they have to queue along with the cash payers and there is little or no time savings.

2. Electronic toll only lanes

Dedicated or transponder-only lanes are the next step forward in speeding the toll collection process. But exclusive electronic or transponder toll lanes retrofitted in old toll plazas have limitations. Traffic doesn't travel very safely between the concrete curbs of a single toll lane usually about 3.3m (11 feet) wide at more than 20 or 30 mph (35 to 50km/hr). Motorists natural urge to speed through has to be curbed. If toll collectors have to cross the lanes there is an additional hazard.

3. Open road tolling

The next stage in the application of electronic toll technology is so-called open-road tolling (ORT). Transponders will read at 70 or 100mph (110km to 160km/hr) so to gain full advantage of the technology motorists should not have to be slowed down at all. Tolling should occur at the prevailing highway speeds on a section of regular highway including multiple lanes divided only by normal pavement markings.

Cash collection can be conducted off to the right side of the open road toll lanes as in a service plaza or interchange with the stopping-to-pay traffic segregated from the electronic toll payers flying through down the middle.

ORT is technologically more complicated. Without vehicles physically constrained by concrete curbs in a single lane the radio frequency (RF) readers have to track parallel vehicles separately through the tolling zone to ensure each vehicle is tolled by tolled only once. Classification of vehicles, usually by axle count has to be performed at speed and on vehicles which may be straddling lanes.

And being wide open highway ORT is more tempting to motorists to fly through without any transponder. Violations have to be recorded and acted on to recover lost revenue and encourage people to abide by the rules and go to the side and to pay cash. Or to sign up for a transponder.

4. All electronic tolling or cashless tolling

The next logical stage is all electronic tolling in which the cash toll collection on the side is abolished. The challenge is to find a convenient way for infrequent users - who can't justify a transponder - to pay. License plate reading cameras needed anyway for enforcement can be deployed to record the license plate number and other aspects of the vehicle - color, shape etc.

Different business models exist for "video tolling" - using the images to get the toll. Motor registry databases can be accessed to extract the owner's name and address and a bill sent in the mail (407ETR). Or the onus can be placed on the motorist to make payment with the camera image as backup in case they don't (CityLink, London).

All electronic tolling usually relies heavily on RF transponders on the windshields of vehicles. However there are alternatives. License plate readers alone are sufficient, some say. London and Stockholm now do their tolling entirely with cameras - video tolling. Electronic vehicle registration tags may be introduced by motor registries that could also be used for electronic tolling. Only the Bahamas do that so far, but others may follow. Satellite location finding equipment (GPS) may be the basis for tolling, as practiced by the Germans for truck tolling on their national motorway (autobahn) network (Toll Collect).

NOTE: just as the term expressway means different things different places - compare Chicago's real Expressways like the Dan Ryan or New York's Van Wyck with California's "expressways" (pathetic apologies for a little signalized arterial) so many of these electronic tolling terms are used differently. Open road tolling (ORT) as the term is used in Chicago is full highway-speed multilane electronic tolling down the middle of the tollway with cash collection in conventional toll plazas off to the sides. We prefer that sense.

Cashless tolling without that cash collection on the side and only highway-speed electronic tolling then needs a term, and we use the term All Electronic Tolling - at least until someone persuades us of a better one. Electronic tolling itself includes use of shortrange transponders (aka 'tags') as automatic vehicle identification or cameras or satellite location finding units.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-09-17