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Toll Facility Safety Study Report to Congress maneuvers to reach off-ramps located just downstream of the plaza. The drawback to physical barriers is that they can be costly to install and costly to maintain. A less expensive alternative is to use a buffer lane in lieu of physical barriers; or to extend the longitudinal markings further upstream or downstream of the toll plaza to assist with lane delineation (as shown in Figure 4-3). High-visibility flexible delineators can also be used to separate traffic at plazas, but they pose their own challenge with regard to maintenance. The Florida Turnpike has found it effective to use wide yellow sergeant-striped delineators in place of the solid white delineators that they previously used to separate traffic. They also found that motorists are more responsive to delineators positioned in a “bowling pin” configuration instead of in a straight line. Figure 4-3. Pavement Markings and Cones Delay Merging Downstream at the NYS Thruway’s Holland Tunnel Plaza For those agencies that face the additional challenge of lane assignments changing throughout the day at a particular plaza, pop-up delineators can be a solution. However, some agencies in colder climates have found that pop-up delineators do not perform well during snowy and icy conditions. To address this, the NYS Thruway designed a new pop-up delineator in-house that operates off of air compression and survives the winters. 4.1.1.3 Signs and Markings to Identify Electronic Toll Collection Lanes Agencies have implemented a number of strategies to direct non-ETC drivers away from ETC lanes. These include adding signs – for example supplementing “brand” signs such as SunPASS with generic signs such as “Pre-Paid Only” (to make it more clear to out of town travelers who may not be familiar with the brand name), and using specialized lane markings, such as differentiating high-speed ETC lanes with purple paint on the outside edges of the lane (as shown in Figure 4-4). In addition to this, several agencies use pavement markings to assist drivers with lane selection at the toll plaza. Some agencies paint messages on the pavement in the lanes such as CASH ONLY, or the name of the ETC system (e.g., EZ PASS). Other agencies have painted lane numbers on the pavement to match the lane Figure 4-4. The Use of Pavement Markings to Identify Dedicated-ETC Lanes Findings – Factors Affecting Safety at Toll Plazas Page 22
Toll Facility Safety Study Report to Congress numbers on the canopy signs, which aids motorists in choosing the proper lane well in advance of the plaza. 4.1.1.4 Designing for Open Road Tolling There is clearly a trend toward ORT in the industry. By a strict definition, ORT refers to fullyautomated electronic tolling in an “open road” environment, allowing vehicles to travel at highway 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 worker-vehicle interactions since there is no plaza, and there are 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 ETC 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. An example of this is shown in Figure 4-5. A new safety challenge that hybrid-ORT has introduced is the issue of managing queue spillback onto the mainline from the cash payment plaza. Queue spillback can result in rear-end collisions. Preventing this involves both design and Figure 4-5. Open Road Tolling in Illinois operational solutions. For the Illinois Tollway, which recently converted all of their mainline plazas to hybrid-ORT facilities (a cash payment plaza separated from the mainline traffic by physical barriers), this has been a challenge that they have had to actively monitor and manage. At the planning stage, they modeled each of their plazas to estimate queue lengths at various times of the day, and designed longer deceleration lanes at plazas where they expected longer queues. As an ongoing effort, they have been monitoring the number of cash transactions occurring at each plaza and performing targeted marketing to residents in areas near plazas with a high percent of cash transactions in an effort to increase adoption of ETC, thereby reducing queues. The issue of queue spillback is expected to be less of a concern over time as more and more customers switch to electronic payment, but is likely to be an initial challenge for any agency switching to ORT. 4.1.2 The Safety of Crosswalks Used by Toll Collectors in Transit to and from Toll Booths When asked about their biggest concern relative to toll plaza safety, nearly every individual that the study team visited with or talked with gave the same response – a worker being struck by a Findings – Factors Affecting Safety at Toll Plazas Page 23
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