World still learning toll-road lessons from Highway 407 across Toronto
While technology has improved since 1999, roadway has stood the test of time
When Torontonians drive through the gantries of the 407 ETR Highway, rather than feeling that tinge of frustration that comes with paying to use the city’s only toll road, they should instead consider how they’re taking part in what was once a marvel of modern technology.
After all, since it opened in 1999, city planners, politicians and developers from every corner of the planet have travelled to Toronto to draw inspiration from the world’s first toll road to use cameras instead of roadside operators.
“It was as though we found the holy grail of tolling, and the world came to see it,” said Kevin Sack, vice-president of marketing, communications and government relations for the 407 ETR Concession Company.
Sack said this enthusiasm was primarily inspired by the idea of a tolling system that, for the first time, didn’t impede on the flow of traffic.
“I can scarcely think of a month that’s gone by where we haven’t had a delegation from China, India, Japan, Germany, London, the European Union, West Africa, South Africa, Russia,” Sack said. “Literally every corner of the Earth has come to see our system.”
The Province of Ontario recently shot down Toronto mayor John Tory’s proposal to toll another one of the city’s highways. If the city had moved forward with a new toll road, however, and aspired once again to build the world’s most advanced tolling system, the result would largely mimic what was first pioneered just a short drive away.
Despite the significant technological breakthroughs since the 407 opened 18 years ago, its approach to electronic tolling has stood the test of time. Individual pieces have been upgraded or replaced, but most experts would agree that it established what has remained a standard model for tolling systems around the world.
All electronic tolling systems today use cameras, sensors, lighting systems and back-end software, the pieces first brought together on the 407. Many, like the 407, also use transponder readers, which interact with dashboard payment systems. While each individual part has improved over the past 18 years, all remain standard elements of unmanned toll roads.
When the 407 was first built, for example, two cameras were required to monitor each lane — which had to be well lit at night — and they still had an error rate between eight and 10 per cent, according to Sack. Today’s error rate is less than one per cent, and multiple lanes can be tracked using a single camera with built-in infrared LED illumination systems.
“We’ve got a new product that’s coming out in about three months time called Sicore 2, which is the latest in ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) cameras,” said Luke Normington, the global head of enforcement and tolling for Siemens.
“That will cover about nine and a half metres of road space — about three lanes of traffic — with highresolution, high-quality images, day or night, on which you can do ANPR recognition. You can also do things like streaming video from those cameras, which traditionally you couldn’t do because of the processing power.”
With each infrastructure upgrade, electronic tolling booths have got progressively more accurate, and less expensive to manage. For example, after nearly two decades of incremental upgrades, the 407’s back office staff has dropped from more than 400 at its peak to fewer than 100 today. Furthermore, with 80 per cent of drivers using a transponder, much of the billing and registration process has been automated.
In the past, the 407 had two gantries, one right after the other.
“It was a set of gantries at each location, and that’s costly,” said Mahrokh Arefi, the North American chief executive of Emovis, a toll services company that manages toll roads around the world, including many in Western Canada. “New innovations — or a necessity in reducing infrastructure cost — have created a design that only uses one gantry in the roadway.”
Though these individual bits and pieces have seen incremental improvements over time, the underlying process for identifying a moving vehicle via camera has remained consistent since it was first introduced in 1999 in the north end of Toronto.
While today’s top-of-the-line tolling systems still mimic that original design, the camera-based licence-plate capturing system will eventually be replaced, and a few early stage projects are providing the first glimpses of what the future of electronic tolling may look like.
“In the future, we will see less and less infrastructure on the highway, and more and more with satellite-based tolling,” Arefi said.
One early example of GPS -based tolling can be found in Germany, where freight trucks are tolled based on the distance logged in an internal GPS system — no roadbased hardware required.
“The German trucking project is focused on trucks, because they can afford to pay $100 or $150 for the device in the truck,” Arefi said, explaining that the technology could become more widespread as the cost declines in the future.
Another potential disrupter to electronic tolling is the connected-car revolution. While still years down the road, it’s becoming less and less difficult to imagine a world where onboard computers monitor toll-road usage and bill the driver automatically.
“Connected vehicles work basically by having a radio inside the car that transmits data to other vehicles and roadside infrastructure,” said P.J. Wilkins, the executive director of EZ Pass, a transponder system used by 37 tolling agencies in 16 American states. “Eventually you won’t need these things in your window anymore. When the vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is more mature, then there will be an opportunity to have mobile payment services embedded in that.”
Until these technologies fully mature, however, delegations will continue to flock to the city of Toronto to marvel at the world’s first electronic toll road, and design the industry’s latest and greatest based on that pioneering model.