When cashless tolling starts on the State Route 520 bridge Dec. 29, it will be one of the most audacious things that’s ever happened to state transportation.
It will affect hundreds of thousands of people on the Northshore, Eastside and Seattle.
It will put tolls on what’s now a free route across Lake Washington.
And if that’s not hard enough — making people pay for something they get for free now — there’s a vast mix of complications, including five types of vehicle transponders, tolls that range from zero at night to $5, depending on the time of day and payment type, and then making everything match.
“This project is among the most complex in the tolling industry,” is how an Expert Review Panel summed it up in an August report.
“The requirements they have established go beyond anything in place today. Implementing this system far exceeds the difficulties experienced by most toll agencies,” the panel added.
With a cost estimated at $4.65 billion, redoing the 520 corridor, including the bridge, will be one of the most expensive road projects in history. The record is held by Boston’s “Big Dig,” put at $22 billion, but redoing Interstate 90 from Seattle to Bellevue in the 1980s came to $1.46 billion and Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement is projected at $3.1 billion. About $1 billion of the 520 cost is to be paid through tolling.
Whether the 520 tolling will work is unknown. Tolling was supposed to start nearly a year ago, but the review panel, made up of six tolling-industry experts, found that schedule never was realistic.
And one panel member, Ron Fagan, who spent 14 years running Texas toll roads, has precisely described what can go wrong:
“You can lose a lot of money doing this if you don’t have the basics right — and there are certain critical operational aspects that you need to understand before you take the risk of just switching to all-electronic because that’s the sexy new thing,” Fagan wrote in explaining why he was going into private consulting.
At the same time, cashless tolling undeniably is foreseen as the way to move people in places as divergent as Australia, South Africa and Florida.
It also offers undeniable benefits: Drivers don’t even have to slow down to pay tolls, so choke points disappear. No expensive salaries have to be paid for toll collectors. Chances for human error are reduced. No huge piles of money have to be counted and physically handled.
Yet making the systems work to allow those benefits can be nearly overwhelming.
“You can’t get it wrong,” said Tyler Patterson, Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) toll operations engineer. “You bill the wrong people, and that shoots down the whole system.”
“My personal feeling is they’re trying to do too many things at once,” said Peter Samuel, a former newspaper reporter who’s found a niche as a toll-road expert through publishing a newsletter called TOLLROADSnews for the past 15 years.
In any case, the WSDOT finds itself dealing with three tolling projects at once, on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Highway 167 in the Green River Valley and now 520.
At the least, just the technical work involves sorting out systems that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.
HOW TOLLING WORKS
The basic concept for tolling 520, which carries over 100,000 vehicles a day, involves two types of charges.
One’s called “Good To Go.”
That’s induced more than 100,000 people to pay a minimum of $30 to buy “Good To Go” transponders, partly through clever TV ads.
The transponders themselves are something of a technological wonder.
They come in versions that can be mounted on places like a windshield or a license-plate holder and tests have shown they’ll even work if they’re stuck in a glove compartment.
They’ve even become so cheap that Samuel says it might soon be easier to give them away than charge for them; they used to cost about $25 each, but now they’re down to as low as $1.25 apiece.
And while once transponders were kind of clunky, box-like things, now they’re barely bigger than a credit card.
Even worries about issues like batteries are in the past.
Present-day transponders use something called “passive backscatter” for their power, meaning the signal that reads the transponder information also powers the transponder itself.
Drivers can see some indications of how the system will work just by driving across the bridge. The antennas and cameras and most of the other visible equipment to allow tolling has been installed on girders of the East High Rise, the transition section that leads from 520’s floating pontoons to land in Medina.
Even that was something of a compromise, said Patterson. When the 520 route opened in 1963, it had toll booths on land, just east of the bridge.
But the land there is virtually unusable for such installations now, he added, with nearly all of it torn up for construction. And putting the gear on the bridge itself, where it would be over water on pontoons, also wasn’t very desirable, leading to the temporary high-rise location.
All of it’s scheduled to be replaced when a new bridge is opened, now planned for 2014.
For all their impressive characteristics, however, the transponder concepts might be considered fairly straightforward.
The theory is that people establish an account and pay for a transponder, probably with a credit card, and when they cross the bridge, a signal is sent and a toll is deducted from their account. Get near the bottom of your money, and an autopay feature puts in more bucks.
In theory, almost nothing could be easier, and cashless toll systems routinely have 70- or 80-percent transponder use, notes Samuel, accounting for the bulk of traffic.
That still leaves thousands of non-transponder drivers, however, and that’s where cameras come in, allowing a license-plate recording system that makes up the heart of the system, matching vehicles and license plates and transponders.
Again, in theory, this isn’t too hard.
The cameras are made by a company called JAI and trace their origins to industrial systems developed in Denmark beginning in 1963.
Part of the technology actually stems from counting things like pop bottles, said Rich Dickerson, a JAI spokesman.
It turns out that JAI cameras are commonly used for chores like inspecting bottles on production lines, checking for things like whether caps are in place, whether the bottles are filled and labeling. That might make it seem like, compared to counting billions of bottles, keeping track of 100,000 cars a day on 520 would be easy.
That’s not quite the case, said Dickerson.
Counting cars on a bridge in a rainy December isn’t really much like counting beer bottles in a factory, said Dickerson.
“It’s a little bit more dynamic an environment,” he said.
It also turns out the key to the cameras isn’t really the cameras themselves, he explained, but the triggering mechanism.
While the cameras are certainly examples of advanced technology, shooting some 30 frames a second, compared to maybe five frames a second for a fancy amateur camera, they’re nowhere near 10,000-frames-a-second cameras that might be used to capture a speeding bullet.
They will record license plates on cars moving up to 150 mph, added Dickerson, but the real secret is finding the proper balance to make everything work.
For example, a constantly-running camera system wouldn’t be good, he noted, since it would generate too much information, which already is something of a problem.
“You’re pumping all this data into the network, you’re creating huge bottlenecks,” he said.
What’s better is a system that takes a picture when there’s something to photograph, like a car in a lane.
Yet even that’s not easy, added Dickerson. If a car is changing lanes, for example, a camera might record just half a license plate.
The way around that is to have enough cameras, and Patterson notes there’ll be 12 of them on 520, with three on each lane, two doing front plates and one for rear readings, for four lanes.
But there’s more.
The cameras have to work all day, of course, but they also have to work at night. And in rain, and snow.
Yet it’s obvious that the usual way people take pictures in the dark — with a flash — wouldn’t work on 520; imagine having someone set off a strobe light into your windshield at 60 mph.
The solution there is to use something invisible — but not an infrared camera, said Dickerson, since that often results in a “floating plate image,” meaning the license plate is visible, but not the vehicle, so the plate and the car can’t be matched.
Instead, what’s used is called “dual-band flash,” said Dickerson, or “near-infrared.”
The effect is to get something like a flashgun, but invisible.
“You want a wavelength that’s just outside human perception,” said Dickerson.
While this can be done, it’s also not exactly simple.
The state’s contractor “should research and test alternative options for night illumination if the near-infrared does not produce the quality required,” the Expert Review Panel concluded in August.
Such technical questions are just parts of many other procedures that have to be in place before tolling can start, however.
There’s a whole toll-collection system, allowing for the mailing of bills to non-transponder-equipped drivers, and arranging the ultimate sanction, of not allowing drivers with unpaid bills to renew their license tabs. Provisions have to be made for rental cars and out-of-state drivers. An administrative-law-judge process will deal with drivers who think they’ve been improperly billed.
