All-electronic toll collection success in Denver

Teri England, 529 Diamond Consulting Services Ltd, describes the E-470's switchover to all-electronic toll collection

In June 2007, the E-470 Public Highway Authority made the business decision to transition to an All-Electronic Toll Collection (AETC) system - in other words, become a cashless road. The transition was accomplished in two phases. The first, which took place on 1 January 2009, involved the introduction of License Plate Tolling (LPT, or video tolling) whilst retaining the facility for customers to pay using cash. The second involved the removal of the cash facility, which took place on 4 July 2009.

E-470 toll road

E-470 is a toll road situated to the east of Denver, Colorado and prior to 4 July 2009 it had a mix of automatic cash machines, manual and express (high-speed) toll lanes. The toll road opened in 1991 and since then road users have had the option of paying their tolls by cash or EXpressToll (the transponder-based toll collection system used by E-470, the Northwest Parkway and the I-25 tolled express lanes in Colorado). These customers have their tolls deducted automatically from a pre-paid toll account. Since E-470's inception, all of the main highway lanes have passed through the middle of all mainline plazas. Thus, non-stop (highway-speed) multi-lane tolling has been an established feature for some time.

LPT is an alternative method of payment for users who do not have an EXpressToll transponder. Cameras photograph the vehicles' front and rear license plates and for all tolls incurred in a month a single bill is issued to the registered owner of the vehicle. For all EXpressToll customers, payment options have not changed; they continue to pay via their pre-paid accounts (by comparison with LPT customers, EXpressToll customers pay a lower toll rate on E-470).

First phase

The first phase commenced when E-470 switched over the high-speed express tolling lanes to AETC six months prior to closing the conventional cash lanes and thus going completely cashless. This period allowed for both E-470 and the travelling public to get used, in a gradual fashion, to this new way of working. On 1 January 2009, therefore, what would have previously been violators in the express lanes became new LPT customers for E-470.

Prior to this first phase taking place, and for LPT to be successful, the Violation Enforcement System (VES) had to be evaluated as a revenue collection system, rather than just a violation system. The results of the evaluation determined that an upgrade of the technology would be required to improve revenue assurance. Several systems were evaluated and the 37 PIPS Technology solution of PIPS SpikeHD cameras (which are capable of taking both front and rear images), was selected by E-470 to provide the upgraded VES.

The E-470 VES originally only took rear license plate shots. The upgrade to the new VES involved taking front and rear image captures, thus increasing the ability to automatically identify a vehicle. This works for both cars and trucks because Colorado mandates front and rear plates for all vehicles, which better enables identification of the vehicle owner.

The major integration work for this project involved introducing the PIPS cameras into the E-470 lanes and testing the software and back-up strategy. In normal operation, the cameras are triggered by the lane controller using information supplied by the 36 Idris system, and the resulting images are dealt with in real time. If the lane controller fails or is taken out of service for maintenance or upgrade, then the cameras go into an automatic trigger mode. In this mode, the cameras self-trigger on recognition of a license plate and store the data locally on the camera. Once the lane controller is operational, it downloads the stored images from the cameras, and the tag reads from the tag readers which have also been storing automatic vehicle identification data whilst the lane controller has been non-operational. The data from both sources is then time-correlated to provide complete tolling records. This backup system to the lane controller has proved to be very effective in the rare cases that a lane controller has failed.

The new camera installation work for 106 toll collection locations began on 10 November 2008 and was completed on all toll lanes by May 2009. The installation of the cameras was completed through the coordination of the E-470 Information Technology team, including the Idris team, Operations, roadway staff, and utilising two contractors for any infrastructure work.

Danna Smith, E-470's Accountant: "Through the use of LPT bills, E-470 could have experienced a loss of revenue from image rejections, customers not paying their bills, not being able to capture license plates in order to bill the registered owners, and a quantity of returned bills due to bad addresses. After considering these impacts, we realised we needed to work on our camera system and that prompted the implementation of front-shot cameras using the new PIPS camera solution."

This resulted in E-470 using its own software capabilities and working with the PIPS software and Idris development teams to design and deploy new software.

Phase two

Phase two of the AETC project took place on the 4 July 2009 and saw an end to payments by coin and cash; E-470 had become an AETC facility. The timetable put in place to achieve AETC was extremely ambitious, and involved high levels of technical integration between the E-470 and Idris engineering teams.

AETC brings with it changes throughout the toll facility, from the road up. When a facility goes cashless, there needs to be serious thought given to the back office operations, acknowledging all the key parts of the system. A major influence is the number of images now generated and which need to be looked at as people without transponders become customers rather than violators. For E-470 this meant various stakeholders had to develop new business rules to meet the needs of how they wanted to implement AETC and their back office. Once the business rules were established, process and system architecture design meetings were held. The outcome was making changes to the current back office rather than re-developing the whole system.

Although the timescale for change from a mixed environment of manual, ACM and high-speed ETC lanes to AETC at first sight appeared to be very optimistic, it was in fact very achievable because the base technologies in place on E-470 did not require major changes. Their main classification and detection system (Idris) already had front-trigger capabilities and the engineering skills of the team ensured that integration of the cameras happened in good time to meet the various operational deadlines.

Communication - a necessity

Communication with the public and toll road users played an important role through the transitional period. Roadway signs were updated and altered accordingly, identifying the changes to lanes as developments took place. An early ongoing PR campaign ensured the public was well informed and regularly updated on progress. Jo Snell, Manager of Community and Public Relations for E-470, and her team had worked since early 2008 on informing the public, communicating the changes which would take place, and the benefits of these actions.

Snell: "The public had a very easy time with the transition to a cashless system and the introduction of LPT. They heard it from the media early and often. The media was a good friend to E-470 in covering the story time and time again. The news coverage really helped us get the word out to the public."

All this team effort meant, on the night of the switchover, that E-470 just followed the script it had laid out for itself and the whole activity went according to plan. Director of Operations at E-470, Dave Kristick's comment summed up the feelings of everyone involved with the AETC project: "The cooperation of the departments was the most proving experience in my time here at E-470. It gave us cause to work together in the same direction with the same guidance and motivations to make this project successful."