Sydney Harbour Bridge goes cashless - first big urban bridge to go all-electronic toll

Sydney Harbour Bridge, an Australian icon and one of the oldest and largest toll operations in Australia went cashless Sunday morning (2009-01-11) about 8am local time. Tolls were collected by hand for the last time from a motorist who was presented with a framed certificate attesting to him being the last person to pay a cash toll to a toll collector on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Along with six other last cash toll payers he received a free transponder with $80 (A$100) credit on it.

Under the new setup motorists have a choice of:

- 'tag' or transponder tolls called E-toll signed with a capital E on a yellow background

- 'pass' for occasional users who get their vehicle license plate captured by camera  and are required to prepay or to pay within 48 hours of their bridge crossing by telephone or online giving their license plate number

Congestion pricing

With the end of cash the Harbour Bridge is going to 3-tiered time-of-day variable tolls January 27.

The toll will be A$4 peak-hours ($3.20 @$A=80c), A$3.00 ($2.40) shoulder hours and A$2.50 ($2) offpeak hours. Toll rates, the same for all classes of vehicles, are only charged southbound.

The last coins received at the bridge are being framed for the Sydney Harbour Bridge museum located in one of the huge granite pylons, and the last automatic coin machine from TSTI, then a TransCore subsidiary is going to a technology museum. There's a tussle with a historic heritage commission over disposal of the oldest toll booths.

The first of the big urban toll bridges to go cashless

New York has the George Washington Bridge and Verrazano Narrows, San Francisco the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay Bridges, New Orleans the Crescent City Connection bridges, Britain its Dartford Crossing Bridge,  Montreal the Jacques Cartier Bridge, Philadelphia the Ben Franklin and  Walt Whitman bridges, Detroit the Ambassador Bridge, Tokyo its Aqualine Bridge Tunnel, Copenhagen Denmark the Oresund Bridge-Tunnel and Lisbon Portugal the 25 de Abril Bridge.

None so far has all-electronic tolling (AET). All collect cash still.

Cashless tollroads are numerous. But Sydney Harbour Bridge is the first of all the grand urban bridges in the world to go to all-electronic tolling, dropping cash for a mix of highway speed transponder and camera based toll collection.

And it's a big bridge by world standards. The Harbour Bridge (8 travel lanes) and 1980s Harbour Tunnel (4 travel lanes) alongside are operated for toll purposes by New South Wales Roads & Traffic Authority (NSWRTA) as one integrated crossing. They do 140k toll transactions per day weekdays. That's in the same league as the George Washington Bridge or the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge.  The bridge alone does about two-thirds of that or 93k/day southbound in the direction tolled.

"Smooth start" to cashless

Reports are the first rush hour this morning (Monday Jan 12 local time) without cash collection was "quite smooth" and problem free. Traffic is seasonally light with many people taking summer vacations there and schools out, so the system isn't fully stretched, but cashless is off to a good start.

There was a major drive to get the motorists to sign up for transponder accounts last year and as of last week 93% were using transponders and only 7% cash on the Bridge/Tunnel combination. Cash toll lanes in use in the last weeks were a mere three, down from twenty cash lanes before electronic tolling began in the 1990s.

The NSWRTA had the benefit of managing a smaller conversion to all-electronic tolling (AET) at the nearby Harbour Tunnel where 6 cash lanes were converted to two AET lanes in July 2007.

Switchover plan

NSWRTA's approach to the switchover to cashless was built around eight parallel lines of work:

1. Technical changes in the cash lanes were handled in four phases, equipment being installed and tested for acceptance to deadlines for each phase, cashless being the 4th phase

2.  A media group handling the publicity campaigns, advertising, ministerial announcements, bus back placards, mailings

3. Traffic management branch handling the lane changes and some median changes

4. Signage team staging advisory signs alerting motorists to the changes and preparation of final signage implementing the change

5. Linemarking crews scheduling the E-Toll Lane patches to the last minute and needed to partly install these to meet deadlines.

6. RTA's Transport Management Centre, which performs the variable tidal flow system changes four times a day, arranges the traffic control for the sign and linemarking crews and messages for the approach roads VMS advising the advance dates of implementation.  There is an advanced Traffic System Incident Management infrastructure established in Sydney for the 2000 Olympics event

7. The Tolling Branch managed the increased sale of E-Tags (the Sydney brandname for the CEN278 transponders) resulting from the publicity prior to the event and reduced cash payers to only 9,000 cash paying patrons out of 140,000 just before the changeover

8. Personnel department offered the toll staff - reduced to about 30 were offered layoff 'redundancy' payment or alternative employment within the state authority.

Toll collection history at Sydney Harbour Bridge

Sydney Harbour Bridge opened 19 March 1932 so cash tolls were collected for nearly 77 years. Through most of the 1930s tolls were collected by toll collectors equipped with a cash bag standing in the open on foot-high islands between the lanes (see pictures nearby). The first toll booths called 'cabins' went in in the 1940s.

Early tolls were 3 pence for horse and rider, 6 pence for a car with additional charges for passengers.

When the bridge went to one-way tolling in 1970 they installed ingenious toll booths mounted on rails, movable laterally across the toll plaza by hydraulics.  This was designed to cater to the tidal flow in which central travel lanes had their direction changed from travel five lanes southbound in the morning peak to four lanes to three lanes in the evening peak.

Then in 1999 they went to a full-fledged 5.8GHz CEN278 European standard transponder toll system from Q-Free. And progressively they added express transponder lanes, and then some open road toll lanes.

The plaza host went through upgrades from a Plessey telephone keyset-based electromechanical system of relays in the 1960s  - very expensive to maintain - to a PDP11 computer in 1979. Using Fortran code it was custom written by a consultant for A$11k (US$8,000) to manage the data from 20 lanes. Staff knowledgeable in Fortran were able to do repeated upgrades over 20 years.

BACKGROUND: The Sydney metro area has a population of around 4.3m and it is fairly evenly distributed north and south of the harbor (spelled harbour there Britishwise) formally called Port Jackson. The central business district is immediately off the Harbour Bridge on its south end. There are other crossings some miles to the west but the Harbour Bridge/Tunnel combination carries a large proportion of north-south traffic and runs about 280k veh/day weekdays.

Sydney Harbour Bridge is a through arch steel truss bridge 1149m (3770ft) in length with the main span 503m (1650ft) with a clearance over the water of 49m (161ft). It is one of the widest longspan bridges in the world with a deck 49m (151ft) across. East to west, it was built with a footpath, 2 trolley lines, four wide road travel lanes,  2 rail transit lines and a bicycle path. The road lanes were restriped to six some time after it opened and the trolley lines were removed in 1958 allowing 8 vehicular lanes, one of which is a bus-only lane.

Opening ceremony drama

During the opening ceremony in March 1932 Francis de Groot a royalist protester annoyed that the King was not invited upstaged the official ribbon cutting. He rode up on horseback and cut the ribbon with a sword declaring the bridge open in the name of the King.  The ribbon had to be inelegantly knotted for the unroyal premier Jack Lang to do the official ribbon cutting deed minutes later.

De Groot in army uniform had blended in with a cavalry honor guard on horseback. A court sentenced him to 5 pound fine for disorderly conduct.

Adventure climbs

Climbing the arch is an adventure organized by Bridge Climb Sydney a small concession business which takes intrepid climbers up ladders, along catwalks on top of the arch to the 'summit' of the bridge. Over 2 million people have made the climb now. They say you have to ascend 1439 steps to get to the top. We've used their logo in the top left corner.

see http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au

http://sydneymotorways.com/

http://www.bridgeclimb.com

TOLLROADSnews 2009-01-12