Texas DOT has begun transponder/video tolling - no cash collection - on two tollroads in the last few days. In the early hours of 27 Nov they began electronic tolling-only on the small Loop 49 in Tyler in far northeast Texas. And 1 Dec they began similar highway speed all electronic tolling on the State Highway 121 (TX121) north of Dallas. Systems are designed and integrated by Raytheon while customer service and account maintenance is done by North Texas Toll Authority under an agreement with TxDOT. TxDOT will soon be handing responsibility for the Tyler pike to the North East Texas Regional Mobility Authority, 'regional mobility' being Texas' euphemistic nomenclature for toll.

Loop 49 a 8km (5mi) first segment opened to traffic toll-free 19 Aug. It is a 2-lane pike designed to be extended in stages and eventually duplicated to 2x2 lanes. Tolls are 50c at the mainline tollpoint or 10c/mile (6c/km).

TxDOT publicity says: "Tolls will be collected either through a TxTAG debit account or by billing vehicles without TxTAGs through vehicle registration information."

TX121 is a new highway in the northern suburbs of Dallas with a combination of tolled and free segments. Where there are tolled lanes there are free frontage road lanes with signals at the intersections of cross streets.

No special branding for video toll in Texas

For TX121 the toll publicity says:

"THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO PAY TOLLS ON SH 121

"Paying tolls on the new State Highway 121 is simple and easy. There's no stopping or waiting in lines, no searching for change, and no reason not to use the road. Electronic Toll Tags

"TxTag stickers, the Dallas area TollTag, and the Houston area EZ TAG are accepted on the road. Toll charges are deducted automatically from your prepaid toll account when you use the road.

"If you decide you'd like to get an electronic TxTag, which can be used on toll roads not only in Dallas but also throughout Texas, go online to www.TxTag.org or call toll-free 1-888-GoTxTag (1-888-468-9824).

"If you don't have a toll tag, you're still welcome to use SH121. There's no need to prepay or register. Just get on, and we'll record your license plate, match the license plate number with the state's vehicle registration file, and send you a monthly bill for your toll charges.

"The toll charges are one-third more for drivers who do not have an electronic toll tag to offset the costs related to processing the license plate information. Also, a $1 statement fee will be applied to each monthly statement for non-tag customers."

No Granny O'Neills yet...

By all appearances the beginning of transponder/video tolling has gone smoothly. At least there is no flurry of public complaints. The dark secret of video tolling is that in the early days at least quite a lot of motorists simply don't get billed because their license plate wasn't properly photographed or the motor registry database lookups didn't work, and who is going to complain about not getting a toll bill?

Of course screwups are almost inevitable and the complaints and bad media will come from Granny O'Neill in Corpus Christi who gets a Tyler toll in the mail though never having been within a hundred miles of the place her whole life, "Never even heard of the darned place, where is it?" but whose license plate happens to have one character different from some Tyler resident.

Give it time for the Granny O'Neill stories to surface.

Of course common video enforcement of transponder lane violations can throw up these mistakes but with the public invited to use these lanes without a transponder the statistical chances rise substantially, and the management of dubious reads is more demanding.

Tampa began 11 Nov

In Tampa the toll authority began similar video tolling on the new Elevated Reversible Lanes on the Crosstown Expressway as a pilot project of Florida's Turnpike which conducts Tampa's toll collection and plans to apply the lessons on a larger scale on the Florida system. Video tolling is done for rental cars in Houston. Around the turn of the century 407ETR in Toronto and Melbourne Australia's CityLink were the first major new systems to be designed from scratch around this combination of transponders and license plate photography, while central London's congestion charge depends entirely on cameras for a day pass downtown. Santiago Chile now has one of the world's largest no-cash toll systems using the transponder/video combination and Israel's only major tollroad, the H6 Trans Israel Highway deploys it too.

Until the November launch in Tampa the only US no-cash pikes have been the various toll express lanes that followed southern California 91 Express Lanes and the Westpark Tollway in Houston, all of which make a transponder compulsory, as in Singapore.

see also http://tollroadsnews.info/artman/publish/article_1590.shtml

TOLLROADSnews 2006-12-03