Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway main toll plaza running 20% over forecast - bad toll plaza backups from low lane throughput

The congestion riddled Gurgaon Expressway southwest of Delhi has been getting 20% more traffic than planners expected - 91k/weekday vs 76k forecast. Government officials cited 140k vehicles per day occurring compared to 76k forecast, but that was an apples and oranges comparison of traffic at all three toll points with forecasts for the main Km24 toll Plaza.

There are plenty of toll lanes. The problem is very low toll lane productivity - probably due to the inexperience of both toll collectors and motorists. According to local reports they are only getting 180 vehicles/hour per lane through the main 32 lane toll plaza. With 20 toll lanes in the peak direction (16 plus 4 reversibles) that's only 3,600/hr throughput in the peak direction per hour. Two travel lanes could overwhelm that low throughput.

And they have four travel lanes per direction.

Four travel lanes in the peak direction can deliver 8,000 to 9,000 vehicles per hour when flowing freely and 5,000 in suboptimal flow. So it is no wonder the plaza is getting overwhelmed.

With 45k/day/direction it is unlikely the road has a peak hour of more than 4,500 vehicles/hour - in urban roads the peak hour is rarely more than 10% of the 24 hour total. But even 4,500 hourly traffic and only 3,600 toll plaza throughput will certainly create big backups.

Delays getting through the Gurgaon Km24 toll plaza are continuing to range between 30 minutes and an hour, according to local reports. It is 12 days since the pike opened, India's first urban tollroad.

Backups are probably at times so bad motorists with transponders or proximity cards wouldn't be able to get past backups to dedicated lanes anyway. Many lanes are being operated multimode - taking cash, cards or transponders.

Government urges more marketing of transponders and cards

Officials of the government ministry of highways met last week with the concessionaire DSC about the toll plaza congestion. They urged them to step up sales of smart cards and transponders, and to improve signage and market them better. About 25k motorists were using the proximity cards and transponders by last weekend and 2,000 more are being signed up every day.

A security deposit on transponder and smart card accounts has been suspended to encourage motorists to sign up.

A concessionaire official is quoted as saying they were frustrated with the small number of motorists who signed up for electronic tolling by the time the tollroad opened - not many more than 10,000. However they are finding the demonstration effect of short lines at the electronic toll only lanes compared with long slow queues in the cash and multimode lanes is now working magic as compared to marketing. The prox cards and transponders are now being taken up.

"There is visible improvement as those caught in long jams can see how vehicles with tags and passes take less time to cross the plaza," the official is quoted in the Times of India.

The operator already has some staff in the lanes trying to speed flow by enforcing lane discipline. Other staff are going to the lines of waiting cars offering motorists change so when they get to the toll booth they'll have the exact money.

The concessionaire says they are hiring more "marshals" to work in the lanes on the approaches to the toll lanes where motorists are queueing.

Toll rates were rounded numbers when first set several years ago but the operator's concession cap provided for inflation indexation, making the toll rates now odd numbers like Rs11, Rs16 and other odd numbers. (Rs40=$1, so Rs1= 2.5c)

The concession agreement has a requirement for "smooth and uninterrupted flow of traffic in normal operating conditions" but it is unclear whether, as a legal matter they presently have normal conditions. Still, the concessionaire and the government have to find a fix to the toll plaza congestion. Potentially profitable customers are being lost whenever motorists are kept waiting an unreasonable amount of time.

Experienced toll collectors internationally can generally handle 400 vehicles per hour.

With lane productivity at Gurgaon starting below 200/hour, higher throughput should be partly just a matter of learning by motorists and toll staff, all of whom are new to toll plazas.

The 20 year concession is a joint venture of Jaiprakash or JayPee Group and DS Construction with DSC acting as operator. The toll system was designed by leading European toll systems house Kapsch and Indian Metro Road Systems.

Traffic forecasts 20% low

The tollroad was designed by the government concessioning agency National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) which also commissioned the traffic and revenue studies on which bids were made. NHAI was criticized for changing the design of major structures on the road, causing delays of more than two years in the opening.

Traffic and revenue studies were done by the government of India owned consulting firm Rail India Technical and Economic Services (RITES). They did their forecasting in 2000 on 1998 data assuming a 5% annual growth in traffic. Traffic growth has in fact been closer to 10% a year in the Delhi area according to local reports.

A 20% error in the forecast is well within normal errors in traffic forecasting.

RITES has a transport planning and economics division that does traffic forecasting. They have their head office in Gurgaon, so some of the forecasters are likely spending time in toll plaza queues.

COMPARISONS: 91k transactions at a toll plaza is large by any standards, but so is a plaza of 32 toll lanes.

The largest toll plaza in the US is probably at the George Washington Bridge (GWB) NY-NJ, which does an average 150k tolls/day (total traffic is 300k/day, but tolling is eastbound only). There are 31 toll lanes there (split between 3 sub-plazas, 12 for each level of the bridge from NJ/ I-80 plus 7 toll lanes at the Pallisades Parkway approach). Those 31 toll lanes move the traffic through reasonably well, but about 75% of transactions are by transponder, 25% cash. Where there are backups at the GWB they are usually the result of congestion from chokepoints in New York City on the interchanges with the Henry Hudson Parkway, Harlem River Dr, Major Deagan Exwy and slow traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway. The bridge has 14 travel lanes, the Trans Manhattan Expressway 12 lanes and the NJ/I-80 approaches 12 lanes also.

BATA's San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, also I-80, has 18 toll lanes (from our count on a Google satellite picture). They give free rides to carpool vehicles on two bypass lanes. The 18 toll lanes do an average 113k toll transactions daily (tolling westbound only) with about 50% transponder use, 50% cash. The bridge is 5 lanes each direction and the approaches more. Sometimes backups are attributed to the toll plaza but they deliberately use it to meter traffic so there isn't stopped traffic on the bridge itself.

Cash tolls at both these plazas are rounded to a dollar (cars $6 at GWB going to $8 soon, and $4 at the SFOBB) speeding toll payments. There were disastrous backups at the Triborough and other MTAB&T bridges in New York City when cash tolls went from a round $3.00 to $3.50 in about 1997. E-ZPass was also being introduced and commuter tokens and coin machines phased out so there were several changes happening simultaneously. The press blamed E-ZPass, but MTAB&T officials said the non-rounded cash toll was the major problem.

Perhaps the best comparison of Gurgaon operations is with a typical American urban tollroad like the FL408 East-West Expressway in Orlando. At their Holland East mainline toll plaza just 5km (3 miles) east of downtown Orlando they have a similar setup to Gurgaon, a conventional two way toll plaza. But it handles 130k transactions/day. It is only just handling the traffic and they are replacing it with a new higher capacity toll plaza nearby that will have up three lanes per direction of open road tolling through the middle.

130k transactions a weekday peaks out in round figures at 6,000 vehicles in the peak hour westbound 7am to 8am and a similar 6,000 eastbound 5pm to 6pm, with over 5,000/hr for each hour each side of the peak 6am to 7am, 8am to 9am etc.

They cope - with normal delays of 2 to 3 minutes at teh pinnacle of the peakhour with the maximum 4 minutes. Most of the daytime/off-peak wait time ranges between 30sec and 90sec.  (UPDATED with OOCEA data 2008-02-12 21:00).  That is using 8 toll lanes in the peak direction - three electronic toll (ET) only lanes and five cash lanes. The roll-through ET lanes, like those at Gurgaon do over 1,300 transactions each per hour for about 4,000 of the 6,000 transactions.

There a couple of coin machine lanes and three multimode staffed lanes, mostly the toll collectors taking dollar bills - the toll is 75c for a car - and giving quarters as change, but a few motorists with transponders too. These mainly cash toll lanes with toll collectors giving quarters as change - sometimes $5 or $10 bills - do 400 tolls/hour.

Holland East does 70% of transactions by transponder during the peak hour and the rest cash, and 64% day round. They do 750 transactions per toll lane across the toll plaza, peak direction peak hour.

The new toll plaza to replace Holland East being called Conway East is designed to handle an expected 218k vehicles a dayby 2025. Currently under construction nearby it is ahead of schedule  which is an opening in the fall of 2009. But barring severe weather or unexpected delays it should be open in the summer of 2009. Cost is $125m.

Conway East will have 12 lanes consisting of two full highway speed or open road toll lanes in the  center and four stop-to-pay cash lanes on the right in each direction.  The tollroad itself presently has only has 2 lanes each direction at present but is at, or over, capacity and is in the midst of reconstruction to 4 and 3 lanes each direction. Details of Holland East at

http://www.oocea.com/assets/STD&Stats%20Manual/Mainline%20Toll%20Plazas.pdf