BATA

July 1 last year (2010) the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge saw a pair of radical changes in the toll structure: (1) a $4.00 to $6.00 increase in the peakhours' toll rate for cars while the offpeak toll remained the same (2) a $2.50 toll on previously free carpool vehicles (HOV3) in peakhours.

TransCore have the contract to modernize the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) toll systems for their seven toll bridges.

San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge was closed Tuesday evening and remained closed today after steel girders and plates collapsed onto the upper deck of the two level span. The debris was part of patchwork repairs made September 5 through 7 after cracks had been discovered in the truss structure of the old span.

This old span is in process of being replaced with a new cable stayed bridge going up alongside.

Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) have given Sirit a $6.6m contract for 410k more California standard Title 21 transponders at an average price of $16.10 each. They are interoperable throughout the state under the FasTrak brandname.

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.

David Halberstam was one of the best correspondents in Vietnam during the war I remember. He loved to discuss and argue, and had an enormous capacity to demonstrate a theme with examples. I remember - rather vaguely - several exchanges with him while we were both reporters in Saigon.