Charging, Tolling & RUC

Managed lanes throughout the US are off to a good start in 2017, according to Fitch Ratings in its latest managed lanes peer review. Actual performance is so far exceeding Fitch’s rating case for the sector as a whole, with 95 Express in Northern Virginia and NTE (segments 1 and 2) in Texas proving to be notable examples. Also boosting long-term prospects for managed lanes is the performance on the longest operating facility, SR-91 in Orange County, California. This state road is seeing strong compound a

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