407ETR celebrates ten years of tolling Oct 14

Toronto's 407ETR tollroad collected its first tolls October 14 1997 and on its tenth anniversary they announced it had achieved a new daily record on a recent holiday Friday - 445,822 transactions. They do 407k transactions on the average weekday and about 380k annual average daily.

Antonio de Santiago, chief executive of 407ETR: “Setting a new one day traffic record is a great way to celebrate our 10th anniversary.”

407ETR actually opened to traffic June 7 1997 along the 36km (22 miles) between H410 and H404 while construction was getting under way on an additional 31km (19 miles). Tolling was due to begin H410 to H404 within a few weeks.

However with the road free a daily average of close to 300k trips were being made - about twice what the toll system was designed to handle. The provincial government outfit which then owned and managed the road held urgent discussions with the contractors on what to do. They were worried that the toll management system would be overwhelmed with images, unable to process them.

They faced the prospect of toll system overload and collapse.

407ETR was the first major tollroad in the world to rely on camera images of vehicles to toll those without transponders. Image transactions or video tolls require orders of magnitude larger files than transponder transactions.

They had two mainframe computers in their operations center on Steeles Avenue in Woodbridge and the plan had been to route all the toll data through one computer, holding the second one in reserve.

They worried that they might have to handle half the transactions as camera images and saw the prospect of 80k, 90k, even 100k video tolls a day. They couldn't handle more than about 65k/day.

In order to enhance their capability they rewrote code to route half their transactions to one mainframe and the other half to the second, running them in parallel. And they added to capacity in other ways.

This enhanced capacity took over four months to build and test.

And - you guessed - it turned out when tolling started it wasn't even needed. Traffic dropped to about 110k transactions per day, more than expected, while transponder use was higher than expected (60%). About 45k images a day were handled. They could have handled that volume of images with a single mainframe after all, and they could have started tolling in July or August.

But with a new tollroad the unexpected often occurs.

In 1999 the province opened 67km (42 miles) and privatization was under way - in which the concessionaire extended each end to the present 108km (67 miles) by 2001. Since then the emphasis has been on widening the road from the original 2+2 and 3+3 lanes. Much is now 4+4 and some 5+5 central stretches are lanes. 

The road has 38 interchanges and goes east-west along the northern edge of the greater Toronto area, Canada's largest population concentration.

There are now 830k transponders in use - ASTMv6 active transponders at 915MHz - and they do over 75% of transactions by transponder, less than 25% video. Now they sometimes have to do 100k images a day, but in ten years their systems have been extensively rebuilt.

With toll revenues of over a million dollars a day at stake they can't afford to lose trip data. Toll equipment mounted on gantries on the ramps compute tolls by registering entries and exits of vehicles and match the vehicle to create a trip - an electronic version of the old toll ticket.

The 407ETR toll system was designed by a Los Angeles area division of Hughes Aircraft which is now part of Raytheon.  

The 407 ETR Concession Company which has a 99 year lease concession from the province of Ontario is owned by Cintra based in Spain, Macquarie of Australia, and SNC-Lavalin a Canadian bank. The operator is Cintra with four or five Spanish toll staff including the chief executive. The other 500 or so staff are Canadians.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-10-14