ACS wins $33m 5-year CSC contract in Bay area v2

ACS has won a $33m 5-year contract for upgrading and operating the San Francisco Bay Area region FasTrak electronic toll (ET) collection systems. The contract is with the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), an arm of the area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which sets policy for the seven state owned toll bridges over different parts of the bay, but also provides for ACS to consolidate those ET services with those of the Golden Gate bridge. ACS has been doing customer service for the Golden Gate bridge since it began ET in July 2000 using a facility in San Rafael in marin County north of the rbidge. Under the new contract it will take over customer service for the larger BATA system which includes tolls on the nation's second busiest bridge the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge and six other bridges which do in total about 350k tolls/day (one-way tolls.) MCI WorldCom had been doing customer service for the state bridges out of facilities in Concord. By the spring of 2005 ACS is due to open a new consolidated customer service center which will do transponder issuance, account maintenance, handling of motorist inquiries, and processing of violations.

ACS toll operations result from a purchase of a business unit from Lockheed Martin. The front end of electronic toll collection was implemented by the now defunct MFS for the BATA bridges. ACS has the country's largest customer service operations by far in support of electronic toll collection in New York and New Jersey.

Rod McMillan, in charge at the MTC (which staffs BATA) told us the contract was also the subject of bids from TransCore, VE Systems which has work for the TCA in Orange County, Cofiroute Global, and MCI. He said the ACS proposal was not the low bid, but judged to be the best value. TRnews 2004-02-02 v2