sticker tags

Mexican toll and motor vehicle registry authorities are cooperating to deploy sticker tags on the windshield of every vehicle in the country.

A joint venture of 3M and Sirit is quietly mounting a major challenge to TransCore's supremacy in sticker tags for tolling and other motor vehicle identification.

Sticker tags are quietly gaining significant US market share, the latest state toll system to commit to go with stickers being the Kansas Turnpike. The Oklahoma Turnpike is testing them. Kansas is closer to a adopting them and it will be the first fully trip-based or 'ticket' toll system to use sticker tags.

July 1 they started selling sticker tags in Florida and collecting tolls with the tiny paper thin wonders - the IBM-developed eGo product supplied by TransCore and being marketed by Florida tollers as SunPass Mini. As of last Thursday we're told 15,500 have been sold, which by our calculation works out to 12,000/week. That matches almost exactly Florida Turnpike Enterprise' target of selling 600k in the first year (though any extrapolation from ten days data is a stretch.)

This road trip report from a Washington DC blogger named KC states the case for non-portable transponders with special eloquence:

"The EZ-Pass is in the other car

Time of insult: approximately 40 minutes into trip

It's official, after many premature reports, Florida has adopted sticker tags: they have passed extensive performance testing, inluding dual mode tests at the Transcore test facility in Albuquerque New Mexico and at a FTE test site, and a big contract has been signed. Failing any last problem, the tags should be available and getting stuck onto windshields in the big peninsula state from July onward.

Victor Montalbo of the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission (NFBC) says that almost 70% of the trucks crossing their Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, the most northerly of the three Ontario Canada to New York State bridges in the Niagara area carry E-ZPass transponders on their windshields. But the Commission has chosen to go to electronic tolling with TransCore's eGo sticker tags instead.

TransCore's eGo sticker tags have gained their first adoption as standard vehicle registration devices. They are being issued to motorists as electronic vehicle registration (EVR) in the British Caribbean island of Bermuda – population 65k, area 53km2 (21 square miles), 47k motor vehicles.

After a year Harris County Toll Road Authority (HCTRA) now has about 1.1 million sticker tags in use but despite an effort to get the old hardcase transponders returned - a mailing offering the sticker tag in place of a returned hardcase transponder - 185k of the original Amtech hardcases are still out there.

Puerto Rico is just passing the half million mark in transponders sold, and has around 400k in use. About 35% of toll transactions overall are now being conducted the with the eGo sticker-tag transponders marketed under the brandname AutoExpreso, and in peak hours the proportion is about 65%.