Bay Area Toll Authority RFPs replacement toll system

Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) are next week requesting proposals for a new toll system called ATCAS II to serve their seven toll bridges in the San Francisco Bay area. The existing system is called ATCAS which stands for Advanced Toll Collection and Accounting System. Advanced back then in the early 1990s meant Intel 386-based PCs running MS DOS as lane controllers, which BATA now wants replaced. (ADDITION: We worked from a slightly incomplete version of the RFP. The final version was posted to the MTC site about 5pm West Coast time Friday. See end of this report for link.)

The proposed new toll system is very conventional - essentially a more modern, more accurate and more reliable version of the functionality and architecture they have - as we read the RFP. An exception is a reference to installing a "zone level system" at the Benicia-Martinez Bridge.

No cashless, no more open road tolling

The draft RFP says that ATCAS II must continue to support both manual toll collection and electronic tolling. No cashless solution wanted. (p12) The procurement excludes video enforcement equipment because an installation of new VES is already under way, but an interface with the VES is needed.

AVI or transponder reads must have an error rate of less than 5 in a  thousand (99.5% accuracy). A similar accuracy is required for the automatic vehicle classification (AVC) - axle counting.

System accuracy of no more than five cumulative errors are allowed per thousand vehicles for AVI (automatic vehicle identification), AVC (automatic vehicle clasification) and VES (video or violation enforcement system).

Penalties for unmet performance

The contract will provide for penalty payments for unmet standards in a schedule of 21 performance criteria. For excessive AVI, AVC and VES errors the contractor will pay twice the toll rate during the mandatory maintenance period.

Prime contractors must have  successfully designed, developed, and installed at least two toll collection systems with electronic tolling and video enforcement within the last five years. There are similar experience requirements for senior project staff.

BACKGROUND: The RFP doesn't say this but we think there are about 70 toll lanes in the BATA system. Three open road toll lanes at the newly built Benicia plaza are probably outside the scope of this contract, but we can't see this spelled out in the RFP.

The seven BATA bridges in the 2007-2008 fiscal year generated $477m (cash $244m, transponders $233m) based on 115m transactions or 315k/day average. San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge by itself accounts for a third of revenue and transactions.

BATA is almost unique among toll agencies in that it gives free passage to carpoolers (HOVs). So 13m/year or about 10% of those traveling in the tolled direction are not tolled.

Tolls levied one direction are presently $4 for cars, then going up by axle count with the typical 5-axle tractor trailers charged $11.25.

Much grief in advancing ATCAS I

ATCAS caused no end of grief in the development by MFS Technologies, a WorldCom spinoff. For several years (1996 to 2000) ATCAS ran in only one lane on one bridge, the Carquinez.

It was probably the world's most protracted deployment of electronic tolling.

The ATCAS procurement started in about 1994, and the first lane was operating in July 1997 and the whole system covering 65 toll lanes wasn't fully wired until the end of 2001. Acceptance took longer and from RFP to acceptance was almost ten years.

MFS went through many project managers and senior staff.

The procurement was by state DOT Caltrans (BATA wasn't yet born). Some said Caltrans deserved as much blame as the vendor.

Some of the difficulties related to a bizarrely complex vehicle classification schedule the AVC was supposed to implement. This was eventually simplified to make AVC more practical.

MFS was going from one set of owners to another. At one stage it was owned by a  bunch of Blagojevich-talking ditchdiggers from Florida, backhoe operators actually.

Throughout the procurement the contractor seemed on the verge of bankruptcy.

Talk in the industry was that MFS ended up spending nearly $60m on ATCAS for which they were paid about $30m.

Despite all that theater it has provided years of service now and spared millions of motorists time they would have wasted in queues.

QUIBBLES: The RFP makes two mistakes in saying: "Each year nearly 130 million vehicles cross the seven Bay Area toll bridges..."

Actually that 130m is the number of vehicle crossings or vehicle trips in the toll direction only. The number of vehicle crossings or trips is probably twice the number counted through the toll plazas or 260m.

Also if the average vehicle crossing the BATA bridges made say 100 bridge crossings a year then 260 million vehicle crossings would mean that 2.6 million vehicles crossed the bridges in the year. There couldn't have been 260 million vehicles crossing the bridges since the total vehicle population of the US is only around 200 million, and we doubt 60m Mexican and Canadian vehicles show up in the Bay Area each year to cross their bridges.

To be fair it is common (if silly) parlance in the traffic business to say 'vehicles' when vehicle crossings or trips is meant. Proposers making wisecracks like these may be penalized one point or $100 per wisecrack, the RFP doesn't say.

The BATA RFP is availble here:

http://www.mtc.ca.gov/jobs/ATCAS_II_RFP.htm

General information about BATA:

http://bata.mtc.ca.gov/index.htm

TOLLROADSnews 2009-01-15 (ADDITION on posting to MTC site 2009-01-16 20:00 East Coast time 5pm west coast)