PlatePass camera tolls for major rental cars interoperable across Texas, Florida, Colorado

PlatePass, one of the larger rental car toll consolidators, announce they now have an interoperable system for camera-based toll collection across Texas, Florida and Colorado. Toll authorities in Florida, Texas and Colorado are now set up to recognize the license plates and other visual characteristics of four major car rental fleets.

PlatePass represent customers of Advantage, Avis, Budget and Hertz and have access to a database of these car companies vehicles across the US and Canada. The rental car database has to be updated every day to add new cars joining the fleets and to subtract the cars that are stolen, wrecked or sold.

Under the program which has been gradually expanding from agreements with individual toll authorities and limited numbers of car rental companies their customers are encouraged to travel in the highspeed electronic toll-only toll lanes, although their cars are not fitted with a transponder but instead are photographed or video tolled, as it is often called.

Toll charges are debited to the credit card the customer uses to rent the car plus a service fee that provides the consolidator with a profit.

Commercial secrecy

An IOP or InterOPerability hub has been set up in Texas where the rental car data is compiled from the four participating rental car companies and sent out each day to the participating tollers. The software had to be crafted to maintain commercially sensitive data from competing rental companies, none of whom will participate if they think their rivals can use the system to gain commercial intelligence on the numbers of their cars and where they are deploying them.

Jim Tuton, president of American Traffic Solutions of Scottsdale AZ which owns the PlatePass brand says: "It has taken years to make this happen, so this is a big milestone for interoperability. Someone can drive any PlatePass enrolled car and drive it through Colorado, Texas and to the tip of South Florida without stopping to pay any tolls along the way."

In E-ZPass country PlatePass and a competitor Highway Toll Administration can't do camera tolling and instead they maintain transponders in rental car vehicles. PlatePass has 50k transponders installed - mostly in Hertz vehicles.

A major challenge Tuton says has been informing rental car customers about the service. The rental car companies aren't much help with this. They are geared up to move customers through their offices and into cars in minimum time, so they don't want to distract their staff with add-on services like camera-tolls.

And most customers aren't interested in how they pay their tolls until they are in the car and on the road. So PlatePass and their competitors have tried a great variety of marketing approaches - counter stands, flyers, cling tags, toll booth wrappers.

Tuton says business is booming in Florida, especially at Orlando and Miami airports where tollroads abound and there are huge volumes of car rental customers. It is strong too in Houston and Dallas TX and Denver CO where tollroads serve some directions of traffic from the major airports.

Transponders are tricky for the consolidators. E-ZPass tollers don't do camera tolling. And many customers bring their E-ZPass transponder with them in their briefcase or handbag and want to be able to use that, charging the tolls to their regular account.

A mechanism is needed for the motorist to disable the consolidator's transponder. Some may prefer to pay cash and they too need to be able to disable the transponder.

The solution is a plastic box for the E-ZPass transponder that contains shielding against radio signals used by the transponder-reader system for electronic tolling.

The box mounts the transponder on a sliding drawer. The transponder is shielded and disabled with the drawer pushed in, and is operational in the drawer-open position.

PlatePass and Highway Toll Administration both mount their transponders in a shielded box.

Patents issued for rental car toll systems - others say not worried

Rent a Toll of Plano Texas says it has been issued a bunch of patents on for paying tolls on behalf of rental cars and corporate fleets. Rental car customers have always been difficult for toll operators to handle with electronic tolling and several specialized companies - some of them advertise in the column on the left - have got into the business of consolidators. In essence they take responsibility for paying all tolls due to the toll authorities from the cars of the covered company, while getting their money back plus a fee from individual rental car customers.

It's a beneficial business, applying specialized skills and innovation to a substantial niche market that the tollers themselves haven't been able to handle well. Unaided it has been the source of substantial violations and lost revenue for tollers, and angst for rental car companies. But the consolidators business is competitive, sometimes contentious, and potentially litigious.

Two big consolidators we contacted PlatePass of Scottsdale AZ and Highway Toll Administration of Long Island NY say the Rent a Toll patent doesn't worry them.

Rent a Toll's announcement says: "The patent, US Patent No. 7407097 relates to a toll fee tracking system comprising a toll authority, adapted to collect data associated with at least one toll fee tracking device (typically a transponder) and a toll rental entity (Rent A Toll) adapted to communicate with the toll authority and a third party entity (typically a Rental Car Agency or Corporate Fleet company). The toll rental entity further acts as an intermediary between the toll authority and the rental car or fleet company for the matching of transactional data from the toll authority and the rental car or fleet company.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060530/DATU013LOGO)

A comment by Rent a Toll president Rick Walsh is: "This is a very important step for Rent A Toll in securing its place as the technology leader in the tolling services industry. This is just the first of 17 different patents we have submitted for various models of tolling services to third-party operated vehicles. We are pleased and excited that we have been able to secure this patent and look forward to further issuance of other patents in the coming months."

Rent A Toll, Ltd operates Pass24(R) pre-paid tolling in Texas, Colorado and Florida. They say they are moving into the northeast.

Highway Toll Administration, the oldest of the consolidators has much of its business in E-ZPass country and fit all their rental car vehicles with transponders.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-09-17