Charging, Tolling & RUC

Spanish company Ficosa and Panasonic are collaborating on a project to produce a major European vehicle manufacturer with a interior rear-view mirror that allows the automatic payment of motorway tolls.

The Lane Construction Corporation, a US subsidiary of the Italian Salini Impregilo Group, has won a design-build contract valued at us$336 million to build the 395 Express Lanes Extension project in Virginia. The project, which is expected to significantly reduce congestion along the I-395 corridor, consists of an eight-mile extension of the 95 Express Lanes and will extend the 95 Express Lanes to the Washington DC line. Preliminary work is expected to begin in March 2017.

Tolling arrangements for the new Mersey Gateway in the UK have been announced. Both the new bridge and the Silver Jubilee Bridge will be tolled from autumn 2017. The Mersey Gateway is a new road bridge across the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal in north-west England, which began construction in May 2014.

HNTB Corporation national director of priced managed lanes and vice president, Matthew Click, AICP, has been appointed by the Transportation Research Board to its Standing Committee on Managed Lanes. Bringing more than two decades of industry experience, Click, who has been active in TRB for more than 12 years, joins the group of transportation professionals for a three-year term.

The European Union, International Finance Corporation, France’s AFD and African Development Bank have committed to funding of up to US$400 million for the US$1.1-billion project to construct the 77-kilometre tolled highway in Uganda, according to Engineering News-Record. The private sector will provide an additional US$300 million. The road will link the capital Kampala to the industrial eastern city of Jinja and is designed to speed up freight flow to landlocked Rwanda, eastern Democratic Republic of Co

German tolling and machine vision specialist Vitronic has developed a technology for free-flow toll collection and enforcement that uses an optical identification and classification method installed at the side of the road and does not rely on gantry infrastructure. For easy installation, the new system is integrated in Vitronic’s City Design housing, which contains the complete sensor array and processing technology including vehicle-to-infrastructure communication-based on EETS compatible DSRC or on R

The Roads and Transport Authority of Dubai (RTA) has extended its contract with TransCore until 2021 to provide customer service operations and maintenance services on the Salik Toll System. TransCore will also provide system upgrades and enhancements, including software updates, servers, increased network and storage capacity, and new roadside equipment. In line with the Authority’s smart government and customer happiness initiatives, TransCore recently developed a new customer application to increase

According to the latest Fitch Ratings report, a widening gap for the US economy, highway, road and bridge funding deficits, can be curbed by establishing interstate US tolling, providing it is approached fairly and pragmatically. The current tolling framework across the US seems to have no sustainable rationale for the average citizen for why some highways (in states on the east coast and the southeast, for instance) are tolled and some highways (like in many western states) are not. This fosters distrus

The New Zealand government has confirmed that it is considering the introduction of open road tolling in Auckland. Finance minister Steven Joyce told a business audience the government could support tolling but would not support a regional fuel tax. He said, “There is no getting away from the fact that central Auckland is built on a narrow isthmus which makes it hard to get around – and the available land transport corridors are rapidly being used. “So beyond the current building programme we are g

Cintra and Plenary, which have a long history of partnering on infrastructure projects, have combined to create a joint venture business to compete in the Australia and New Zealand road infrastructure market, with a focus on toll road and concession projects. Netflow brings construction capability through Cintra’s sister business Ferrovial Agroman. Cintra CEO Enrique Diaz-Rato said Netflow will play an important role in creating competition in the sector by looking to develop roads with a sharp focus on