Toll Facility Safety Study Report to Congress - About

Toll Facility Safety Study Report to Congress
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
Toll facilities play a vital role in meeting the Nation’s transportation needs. In general, they
offer high levels of service, well-maintained roadways, and a relatively safe environment – with
toll authorities placing significant focus and resources on reducing risks to customers and
workers alike. However, these facilities are not without their safety challenges. Traditionally,
toll agencies have relied upon fare collection techniques that require vehicles to rapidly
decelerate from freeway speeds, navigate sometimes confusing plaza facilities, undertake manual
(or increasingly automatic) fare transactions, and then accelerate and merge back to mainline
traffic conditions. These maneuvers present a unique situation in roadway operations and
introduce safety challenges both to the traveling public and to those workers who support the
fare collection operation.
To combat this problem as well as others, more and more agencies are evolving to open road
tolling (ORT). By a strict definition, open road tolling refers to fully automated electronic
tolling in an “open road” environment, allowing vehicles to travel at full speeds when passing
through toll collection points. Under this definition, customers must either possess an electronic
transponder, or be assessed toll charges via license plate recognition technology. By this strict
definition, safety is improved as there is inherently lower exposure: there are fewer workervehicle
interactions since there is no plaza, and fewer vehicle-vehicle conflicts since less traffic
is traveling through a plaza; also, noise and emissions are lessened due to the reduction in
vehicles starting and stopping.
Beyond this strict definition of ORT, a number of agencies have implemented what might best be
termed hybrid ORT operations: that is, they include a combination of mainline, full-speed
electronic toll collection along with fully-separated cash lanes. Typically, cash-paying
customers must exit the roadway or shift to a separated toll plaza in order to make cash payment
at a traditional, staffed plaza.
Historically, all customers were required to stop at plazas to pay cash tolls and were then
required to merge back to highway speeds, thus disrupting the overall traffic flow. With the
introduction of electronic toll collection (ETC) systems in a mixed-mode collection facility, the
problem of flow disruption has been exacerbated by the combination of some vehicles stopping
to pay cash with others traveling freely through toll booths with technology electronically
registering their payments. Downstream of the toll plazas, all of these vehicles must then merge
to resume highway speeds. Certainly, electronic toll collection has improved overall mobility
(and can improve safety when used exclusively as opposed to being used along with cash
collection), 1 but it has also raised significant new safety concerns that were previously nonexistent.
1 An NTSB report published 4/18/06 concluded that “traditional toll plazas…create traffic backups that present a
safety hazard; the conversion of traditional plazas to electronic toll collection systems should greatly reduce such
hazards and improve safety on toll roads.” In a response to the NTSB report, the FHWA noted the increasing
popularity of toll supported roadways and the need for consistent toll plaza traffic control strategies. These issues
are addressed in the report, “State of the Practice and Recommendations on Traffic Control Strategies at Toll
Plazas,” which can be found online at http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/rpt/tcstoll/index.htm.
Introduction Page 1