Electronic toll collection (ETC) may prove to be one of the major enabling technologies of the 21st Century. First deployed on the Highway 407 ETR® in Toronto in the mid 1990s, AET allows us to collect a toll from vehicles passing by at prevailing freeway speeds without toll plazas or toll collectors. Therefore, we now have the ability to manage our roadways in a number of ways that we couldn’t do before. The more significant of these options that AET enables include the ability to reliably and accurately:
o impose user-fees on motor vehicles in a cost-effective manner
o retrofit toll operations on existing freeways in urban area
o value-price roadway services (including dynamically pricing)
o automatically enforce toll and other moving violations, and
o actively manage traffic on our freeway corridors.
In fact, the Environmental Leader* has reported that AET has been so successful that a recent study by ABI Research suggests that annual revenue collected by AET in the U.S. could approach $4B by 2018 (twice that world-wide).
This blog will address issues associated with the implementation of AET and other roadway funding options so that facility owners, operators, the financial industry and the public at large can best benefit from its success.
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* http://www.environmentalleader.com/2013/07/29/electronic-toll-collection-system-revenues-will-reach-8-5bn-by-2018/
First published at www.tollingtheline.blogspot.com July 30, 2013, revised upon republication.
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