All electronic tolling urged by Maine protester - interoperability group pledges specs by next spring

All-electronic tolling has been picked up by protesters in the fight over the rebuild of the York mainline toll plaza in southern Maine. Using pictures of 407ETR in Toronto, they produced a one-page flyer headed The Better Way: All-Electronic Tolling. (DISCLOSURE: those involved picked up some of the information from TOLLROADSnews and we had some emails back and forth. But the flyer is their work.)

With the traffic volumes they are projected to handle seasonally Maine Turnpike Authority estimate they need 15 cash lanes plus four express transponder lanes and a 'sausage' of land 135m wide by 800m long (430ft x 2600ft) to accommodate the ORT + cash plaza. By contrast with cashless all-electronic tolling they could do the toll point in an existing width of highway. There would be no real estate 'sausage' to acquire - just a pad for a service vehicle next to the gantries.

Most of the protesters of the Turnpike's plan - organized around a group named Think Again - want to keep the York toll plaza where it is. The Turnpike Authority has already rejected that because it's a difficult site (low lying, wetlands, on a curve, close by the north facing ramps of a nearby diamond interchange).

The Turnpike is right about that. It's a rotten site on which to build modern open road tolling through the middle with cash collection to the sides. The roadway's curve makes sight distances to the cash lanes too short and the close ramps introduce weaving movements on the south side of the toll plaza that are a safety hazard.

see earlier article

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/3442

If the Turnpike is forced by political pressures to keep the plaza at the present site it will have to forgo open road tollling through the middle. Backups will get progressively worse and this "gateway" to the state will provide an increasingly irritating and tawdry welcome to visitors, as well as being a growing nuisance to the locals. There will also be gradually increasing diversion of traffic onto local roads.

The Think Again lot need to think again.

The Maine Turnpike Authority have selected four alternative sites but they face major local opposition and a capital cost of $35m to build a modern open road plus cash plaza. They've looked at all-electronic tolling but so far rejected it on the grounds that they'd lose too large a slab of toll revenue to uncollectables. They point out that no one else in the E-ZPass area has done cashless all-electronic tolling (AET) and with half their motorists in the busy summer tourist season the potential rise in uncollectable tolls is a serious consideration.

They'll have something of a uncollectables problem to manage anyway in the open road lanes down the middle, which are an invitation to violate without an effective enforcement policy. But the problem is no doubt a bigger one with no cash collection.

Interstate cooperation patchy

Veteran operations chief at Delaware Memorial Bridge and Maryland Transportation Authority Curt Esposito said on his retirement recently that lack of standardization and poor cooperation between states on violations video was the most frustrating issue he encountered.

Alliance for Toll Interoperability

JJ Eden operations head at the North Carolina Turnpike agrees but thinks it can be fixed with concerted effort. It is the priority of the new Alliance for Toll Interoperability (ATI). ATI now has operations officers of 26 toll agencies involved.

"ATI has really taken off," Eden says.

"We've got a lot of interest and enthusiasm. Several of us are doing research and study for our own purposes and we are going to share the results through ATI."

North Carolina is sponsoring a "shoot-out" of camera equipment from different manufacturers.

ATI plans to detail the specifications for handling one another's images by the spring of 2009.

It has a meeting coming up April 30 in Orlando. People who can't attend in person will be able to call in and participate conference call style.

Eden who was one of the founders of E-ZPass as an operations man at the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission in the early 1990s says: "In E-ZPass we changed the whole model for tolling by getting together to develop a way to use RFID (transponders and readers) across state borders. That changed the way we did toll business, more dramatically than we even expected.

"We're at another point like that, but this time it's with video. We're there again at a time of great potential. We've got the technology to change the business model again, but again we've got to be creative in collaborating across agencies to use the technology to the maximum."

He says the toll industry will at some point have to deal with features of license plates that hinder accurate automatic video reads by approaching the designers and manufacturers of license plate series. By getting together as a group they'll have more chance of progress.

The Homeland Security department has a similar interest in license plates being more readable, he notes.

"We have to work on that too," says Eden, who will have to manage all-electronic tollroads coming along in North Carolina.

407ETR systems leader also thinks video the future

Tom McDaniel, another toll systems veteran who at Hughes (now Raytheon's HTMS) led the development of Toronto's 407ETR in the middle 1990s thinks that camera equipment is getting so good it has almost made transponders obsolete.

"I've been working with transponders for about twenty years, but I look at the advances in cameras, and it's amazing. I don't think we'll need transponders much longer. We'll be able to do it all with cameras."

Even if you don't go that far the exchange of video data - video interoperability - does seem to be of growing importance. The problems are getting so important they will be solved.

As the flyer says Maine doesn't need to build a new $35m toll plaza with cash lanes. Operations people around the country are working together to manage the problems of cashless tolling.

ATI chair is jj.eden@ncturnpike.org

NOTE: the major anti-new toll plaza group Think Again has a website at

http://www.thinkagain2008.com

 

TOLLROADSnews 2008-04-20