TransCore gets Ohio ET contract for $28.7m - to go live Aug 2009 (ADDITIONS)

The Ohio Turnpike Commission has selected TransCore to do a toll system upgrade including the Turnpike's first electronic toll (ET) system for $28.7m. The contract also provides for setting up a customer service center to establish and manage ET accounts, dispatch transponders and handle violations and inquiries. The Turnpike Commission will staff the center itself. Date for activation of ET - an E-ZPass system - is August 2009. The contract will install Mark IV antennas in the existing 230 toll lanes which will be gated, so there is no major violation system.

Other than TransCore  other bidders for the contract were ACS (Dallas based), ETC (also Dallas area) and Indra (Spain based). A Turnpike official tells us that the Commission's evaluation team scored the four proposals on a "technical" rating without looking at bid prices and rated TransCore and ACS the two best, eliminating ETC and Indra. The official says that only the prices of the short-listed two were opened, and the Commission does not know the prices bid by the two ranked lowest. ACS bid $43.4m and lost on price because their price was so much greater than TransCore's. ADDITION 2008-03-19 14:25

The job

The Ohio Turnpike is 388km (241 miles) long spanning the state from the borders of Pennsylvania and Indiana. Tolls are computed by trip with a ticket system. There are 31 tolling points - two being end-of-road mainline plazas and the rest side plazas at the 29 intermediate interchanges.

The Turnpike will charge 50c a month for maintaining an ET account but there will be no discount for use of transponders. Close to half the vehicle on the Turnpike already have transponders issued by other E-ZPass Inter Agency Group members.

The contract also provides for a new vehicle classification using smart loops to count axles in place of the old IBM system that weighed vehicles. The weigh-in-motion machines will be retained for checking overweight vehicles.

New multimode automatic toll payment machines (ATPMs) will take coins, bills and accept swiped credit cards.

The toll system upgrade will also see about $11m of construction work and $10m in new signage in separate contracts.

A crew from Vollmer, then Stantec and later Jacobs Carter Burgess led by Richard Gobeille have been advising the Turnpike in the toll system studies and procurement.

Unsuccessful bidders were ETC, ACS and Indra.

ET from sea to shining... Illinois cornfields

Ohio is the last major toll system in the US to adopt electronic tolling. This will provide for continuity of electronic tolling from the west of Illinois to central Maine in the north and Virginia to the south.

The first electronic toll system was on the Dallas North Tollway in Texas which began taking tolls by transponder in July 1989 (CORRECTION HERE). The New Orleans bridges were given a similar Amtech read-only system to the DTR at around the same time. The Oklahoma Turnpike followed about a year later. At the same time in Europe Autostrade in Italy and Combitech a Philips spinoff were doing electronic tolling in Norway.

Electronic tolling really went mainstream in the mid and later 1990s when it was adopted with a passion in the big toll states of New York, New Jersey and Florida.

The initial rationale that only 'commuters' - regular daily users - would get transponders and others would continue to pay cash. Ohio has extremely few commuters. But by early this decade it was clear that cash becoming the minority payment mode most places and transponder use was spreading broadly.

Now the leading edge development is all electronic tolling - transponder and cameras - with no cash collected on the road at all.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-03-18 CORRECTION 2008-03-19 10:10