Bridge Tolls
Advocacy Project

High-Speed Tolling

A perennial argument against tolling the East River bridges is that the toll booths would cause unmanageable traffic backups. But technology to do away with toll booths entirely is fully available: electronic toll collection, using overhead gantries or roadside antennae to read windshield-mounted transponders. Such systems are already in use with E-ZPass in the NY metro area and with similar transponders elsewhere.

Mayor Bloomberg has touted boothless toll collection, most notably reported in the New York Times.

Current NYC Metro E-ZPass Facilities
 

Three new (June 2004) reports from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign (TSTC) summarize the rapidly advancing state-of-the-art of "open-road" (boothless) tolling in our region and across the USA. These gantry-type facilities generally have a speed limit of 55 MPH and show precisely the type of system that could collect tolls seamlessly on the space-starved East River bridges.

New Jersey Turnpike Exit 18W

 

The Open Road is the master report (17 pp). It contains this photo (above) of high-speed tolling at NJTP Exit 18W, another (not shown here) of the Garden State Parkway Pascack exit, and a drawing of a similar system now in use at Port Authority's Outerbridge Crossing. The report dismantles the MTA's objections to upgrading to high-speed tolling at NYC toll bridges and tunnels. For TSTC's one-page brief on open-road toll developments in NY/NJ metro region, see Express Tolls Proliferate (August 2, 2004) and Non-Stop Tolls in Our Region (June 14, 2004) For TSTC's two-page brief rebutting MTA objections: MTA Exceptionalism Considered (June 14, 2004) Updated TSTC report: "Port Authority, Thruway Move to Speed Tolls" (August 9, 2004)
Biddle's Corner, Delaware (photo by Christopher G. Mason)		The State of Delaware also uses E-ZPass for toll collection. Delaware has a "highway speed" facility operating at Biddle's Corner Toll Plaza on SR-1 (pictured), which is very similar in operation to the New Jersey express lanes. Delaware plans further high-speed lanes at two other locations. (Source: DelDOT Press Release, June 12, 2002)

On the New Jersey Turnpike, the Interchange 6 toll facility, while not strictly of the gantry-type, demonstrates the ability of conventional E-ZPass installations to function at speeds of at least 45 MPH. This facility's allowable speed is limited by the need to integrate high-speed into an existing old-fashioned toll booth facility, and not by E-ZPass technology itself. "Medium-speed" (25 MPH) E-ZPass lanes have gone into effect on the Outerbridge Crossing in New York. The Daily News reported that similar lanes and higher speeds are being phased in on the Goethals Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, and the Bayonne Bridge between now and 2007. "Parts of toll plazas will be removed, and new overhead equipment will collect tolls from tags without requiring cars to slow at all." 25-MPH lanes have also been installed at the George Washington Bridge's Palisades Interstate Parkway Toll Plaza. Read more about high- and medium-speed tolling in New Jersey and New York in the Tri-State Transportation campaign's Mobilizing the Region (January 12, 2003).		New Jersery Turnpike Exit 6

Toronto's Highway 407

Highway 407 is a fully-automatic "cashless toll road" and provides tolling at highway speeds.

Highway 407 uses the same technology as E-ZPass, although the systems are not inter-compatible (source: http://www.pbaezpass.com/faq/).

A March 2004 NY Times story on Toronto's Highway 407 suggests that technology for reading license plates electronically can stand improvement. At the least, the eventual system for billing vehicles crossing the East River bridges ought to match up plates captured on camera with plates in DMV records, so Explorers don't get mistaken for Camry's. We also note that Toronto's customer-service staff ratio of 1 per 1,000 daily vehicles translates to around 450 employees for bridge tolls here, which would cost around $30 million annually, or a very manageable 5% of prospective toll revenues.

California SR-91
"All tolls are collected by Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI), in part because there is not enough space in the freeway median for conventional toll booths."

More High-Speed Reading
Here's a charming piece on E-ZPass, chock full of good info, including an implementation plan for high-speed collection, from AAA New York.