Penn Pike tunnels to get improved monitoring & signage from a New Adesta

The Pennsylvania Turnpike has contracted for an upgrade to monitoring and signage at several of its mountain tunnels. The job involves 15 in-tunnel CCTV cameras, fiber and wireless communications, 22 variable message signs and arrow boards and an internet protocol (IP) management system at the Harrisburg PA headquarters.

The contract price is $8.6m.

It's a small plain vanilla job.

The arresting news is the name of the contractor selected  - Adesta.

Grimmace or groan

Many in the toll business used to grimmace or groan at the very mention of that company name.  

Adesta and fiasco were synonymous a decade back with some of the largest electronic toll installation contracts in the US in deep trouble due to their non-performance - the E-ZPass installation in New Jersey and Delaware, and FasTrak in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There was great irony in the trouble they had making electronics work on the home turf of Thomas Edison and on the great toll bridges leading into Silicon Valley.

Adesta is a name right out of the the most disastrous, if often comic, pages of tolling history, part of a drama of short-lived but colorful execs, chronically missed deadlines, repeated contract renegotiations, cost overruns, litigation, financial crises, rapid staff turnover, and generally chaotic non-performance in the early years of electronic tolling.

Spinoff of WorldCom

It was a spinoff of WorldCom but in corporate rearrangements the same contracts and some of the same people went through the corporate names MFS Technologies and Able Telecom.

Sept 2000 we reported:

"Able was finally delisted mid-Oct by the NASDAQ stock exchange for failure to file proper financial reports. Adesta/MFS its ET (electronic toll) subsidiary has been unable to seek new work after having been rejected by the Golden Gate Bridge as unfit to tender two years ago. Kept afloat to the tune of tens of millions by WorldCom it has continued with great difficulty working on its large toll projects (in New Jersey and California)."

We called it a "crooked and bungled spinoff from WorldCom followed by a long travail of abuse at the hands of lying corporate looters from southern Florida."

Another report involving Adesta:

"In one of the great disasters of electronic tolling the main contractor, a WorldCom spinoff named MFS Technologies, then Able Telecom, then Adesta (this company was) in constant turmoil. They missed deadline after deadline in installing the new toll system (for New Jersey Turnpike, Garden State Parkway, Atlantic City Expressway and Delaware Turnpike, and in the San Francisco Bay area) and were never able to deliver a working violations processing system… An almost total fiasco!"

At least two toll agency chiefs lost their jobs thanks largely to the non-performance of Adesta and its corporate progenitors.

Some reports back then:

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2187

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2514

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2571

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2658

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2685

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2763

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2786

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/3543

Here's a more positive report except that Ed Gross NJ Turnpike CEO who inspired it was soon after pushed out for being too soft on them, while we were told we'd been 'had':

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2752

The wash-up wasn't all dirty water.

ACS, ATS and other competent, honest groups came from nowhere to being major players in tolling by taking over the mess left behind by the WorldCom/Able/MFS/Adesta crowd in New Jersey, Delaware and northern California, and quietly getting systems working.

A New Adesta

Here we are now years later.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike procurement staff must have reassessed this company and decided all that bad history is behind it.

A New Adesta, it must be, to be back in the toll biz.

see http://www.adestagroup.com/

TOLLROADSnews 2010-04-12