The most high-tech highway ever to make it off the drawing boards opened in California last week adjacent to the 10-mile-long bottleneck known as state Route 91, one of the busiest stretches of highway in the Los Angeles region. Not only the first private toll road to compete with a free public road at such close quarters, the new highway is also the world’s first fully automated toll road, relying on what could be viewed by the cynically minded among us as dauntingly Big Brother-esque techniques to collect fares and uphold state laws. The Route 91 Express Lanes were financed, built and operated by California Private Transportation Co without any federal or state funds, at a cost of $126m under a franchise agreement with the California Department of Transportation. The deal is that the company get to collect all tolls for the next 35 years, during which time it will have sole responsibility for maintenance and law enforcement costs over the 10 mile stretch of road. The Express Route’s ownership will then revert back to the state.
Toll-zone
Fares on the four lane road will be collected electronically via a FasTrak transponder the size of a pack of cards attached to the car’s windscreen. When a vehicle approaches the Route 91 Express Lanes they are greeted by large variable message signs that display traffic information and current toll rates. These can be as little as 25 cents for a one-way trip during the dead of night but rockets up to $2.50 for a rush-hour jaunt, unless, that is, you are part of a car pool. Any car with three or more people inside travels free in a special lane. What’s more, the company guarantees any and all commuters willing to pay the price a delay-free, 65 miles an hour ride or their money back. An overhead reader communicates with the in-car transponder to collect identification information. The data is then combined with time of entry information and passed to the toll-zone computer via a fibre-optic network. As vehicles progress down the highway and under the toll-zone gantry housing antennae and other subsystem equipment, they are detected by various in-lane and overhead sensors. The sensors can identify vehicles travelling up to 100 miles per hour. In-road sensors provide speed and traffic volume information to the operations centre. More than 2,500 vehicle transactions per lane can be processed per hour and 65,000 transactions can be stored on a stand-alone basis, providing built-in transaction buffering for the toll zone computing system. Any vehicle travelling the route without a transponder will be captured on video and if a highway patrol car is not available a ticket will be mailed to the vehicle’s owner. Fines begin at $100 for a first offence, rising to $300 for more or for multiple violations.
By Louise Williams
The Omaha, Nebraska provider of intelligent infrastrucure for communications and transport applications, MFS Network Technologies, subsidiary of MFS Communications Co Inc, supplied and designed the Route 91 Express Lane’s equipment with technology co-developed with Texas Instruments Inc. This is just one of a number of projects with which the company has been involved. The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, the South Jersey Transportation Authority and Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority have all established electronic toll systems using technology from MFS. On the European front it took part in trials on German autobahns during the summer of 1995 in a project using similar technology to the Route 91 Express Lanes but so far it has not advanced past the trial stage. It is now almost four years since the UK government announced that motorway tolls were to be introduced. The eight consortia who will be testing free-flow multi-lane road tolling technology were announced in August 1995 but actual lab trials planned at the Transport Research Laboratory in Crowthorne, Berkshire have been subjected to further delays (CI No 2,732). The Department of Transport lay the blame for the delays on trials taking place in South Korea in the spring and
said equipment would be tied up until the summer. If schedules go as planned, by this time next year, England could see its first motorway trials taking place on the M3, between between junctions 6 and 7, south-west of Basingstoke. A number of gantries will be errected but there will be no charge – yet. The Department of Transport reiterated the government’s committment to introduce motorway tolls. No decisions have yet been made as to how licences will be distributed. New legislation will be needed to be in place first, but this stage is still a long way off. One of the consortia that will be testing the technology, Europassage, includes MFS Network Technologies, along with Texas Instruments, Gesellschaft fur Zahlungssysteme and Computer Recognition Systems Inc.
Retrospective
If they make the successful bid its a fair bet that the UK will follow hot on the heels of the Californian experience. For one thing, roads in the UK have not got the space to erect toll booths, so the automatic capturing of information could be the answer the Department of Transport has been looking for. Even public opinion appears to have gone quiet on the subject of motorway tolling. On thing that could put a spanner in Sir George Young, the Transport Minister’s works, is a change of government. Even if Prime Minister John Major holds out until 1997 for a general election, there is not sufficient time to get a scheme under way. While the Labour Party is not against the idea of motorway tolling in principle, it fundamentally opposes retrospective tolling, or having to pay to travel on existing stretches of motorways. A Walworth Roader pointed out that although the party would not necessarily stop laboratory testing from going ahead, it’s a decision that would have to be taken in government. Would it want to spend money to test a toll sytem on motorways when it has no intention of making us pay to drive existing public roads?
