Fleets Urge Uniform Toll-Collecting System to Speed Vehicles and Reduce Expenses

This story appears in the Nov. 26 print edition of Transport Topics.

Carrier executives say they are becoming increasingly frustrated with spending the time and associated costs it takes for their drivers to inch their way through highway toll plazas. And they say there is a way to fix much of the problem: interoperable electronic tolling systems.

“Think what it costs to stop the truck,” said Royal Jones, president of Mesilla Valley Transportation, Las Cruces, N.M., which runs 1,265 units and ranks No. 72 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers. “They lose part of their 11 hours; they lose time and efficiency; they waste fuel.”

Jones added, “It would sure be nice to have one pass” that can be used on all the tolling systems in the country. He also said that, whenever possible, he routes trucks away from toll roads.

NFI Industries, Cherry Hill, N.J., is a fleet of about 1,800 units that ranks No. 24 on the for-hire TT 100. President Joe Roeder said he is “absolutely” for interoperability.

Echoing Jones, Roeder said, “We would like one transponder to work all across the nation.”

As it is, the carrier has bought toll tags for all the states in which it hauls cargo, meaning that an NFI truck going from New Jersey to Florida has an E-ZPass tag for the Northeast, a Peach Pass for Georgia’s toll roads and a SunPass for Florida.

And trucks on that route may soon need two new toll tags — for Virginia and North Carolina. Both states have asked the federal government for permission to toll their portions of Interstate 95.

According to the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association — the organization of toll agency owners and operators — 34 states have at least one tolled highway, bridge or tunnel.

The alternative to stopping the truck or buying multiple tags is interoperability — a concept Congress has promoted for years but stopped short of mandating.

If the technology that toll agencies use for their highway tag readers and for their billing systems were interoperable from agency to agency, truckers could travel anywhere with one tag, and toll bills could be sent monthly to carriers from each toll agency.

“It just makes kind of good sense,” said Randy Mullett, vice president for government relations and public affairs at Con-way Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich., which ranks No. 3 on the for-hire TT 100. “It’s like, ‘OK, my driver’s license is honored every place in the country.’ ”

The situation for trucking is “ridiculous” because the federal government has not exercised leadership on the issue, said Joshua Schank, president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

“The federal government isn’t even acknowledging that tolling exists,” Schank said. “There’s no comprehensive plan for doing tolls, despite the fact that tolling is increasing.”

Officials at the Federal Highway Administration declined to speak with TT about interoperability except via a brief statement: “We continue to monitor developments in the industry to investigate the best ways to bring about . . . interoperability noted in the MAP-21 provision.”

MAP-21 is Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, the two-year transportation reauthorization bill Congress passed in July. The bill directs tolling authorities to address interoperability but provides no sanction for failing to do so.

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, put the interoperability provision in the bill, a committee staffer said, speaking on background.

Because he’s from Florida, a state with many toll authorities, and he works in Washington, where his Florida tag is not accepted by the E-ZPass tolling system, Mica saw interoperability as a benefit for trucking and the nation, the staffer said.

MAP 21 is not the first transportation reauthorization bill to tell tolling agencies to work on becoming interoperable. The prior reauthorization law, SAFETEA-LU, told them the same thing.

After wrestling with the issue back then, however, the FHWA decided it did not have the technical expertise or the authority to carry out rulemaking, said officials at IBTTA.

IBTTA officials and others said FHWA has little or no authority over interoperability because it offers no carrot, such as federal money for redesigning technological systems, and carries no stick because few toll roads get federal funds that can be withheld if agencies don’t comply.

The House committee staffer, however, said some toll roads do get federal money and that Mica saw his provision as a beginning to prod toll agencies to work harder on making their readers and back-office systems interoperable.

Tim McGuckin, executive director of the OmniAir Consortium Inc., an advocacy group for interoperability, said that although the provision in MAP 21 may be soft or vague, it is a valuable step forward.

“MAP 21 has succeeded in inspiring the industry to start moving faster,” McGuckin said. “They weren’t getting there.”

Since passage of the new reauthorization bill, a working group of toll agencies and technology providers has formed to begin addressing the possibilities for interoperability.

The hurdles to interoperability fit into three categories, tolling experts said: the hardware needed on highways to read the toll tags on vehicles; the back-office billing systems to direct the toll revenue to the correct agency; and the politics involved if some agencies have to buy new systems to become compatible with a neighboring system.

Some experts said the technology already exists to make the highway antennas that read toll tags interoperable. They cite Texas and Florida, states that made their tolling agencies compatible.

Other experts are more cautious, however, about making agencies buy whole new systems, which could involve multibillion-dollar expenditures.

“To achieve interoperability, there is no single path that is always best,” said Dick Schnacke, vice president of TransCore Commercial Services, Beaverton, Ore., one of the earliest providers of the technology that allows toll readers to accept tags from other tolling agencies.

“There is too much legacy investment out there for anyone to support a ‘throw away and start over’ approach,” he said. “TransCore has worked with its customers for years as they struggle with the balance between getting their money’s worth out of the systems they have and interacting with neighboring agencies [that] may have implemented a different technical solution.

“There are ways to achieve this balance, but it takes a mix of technology and experience,” he added.

The back-office side is a greater challenge for interoperability, tolling experts said. Toll agencies have individual billing technology and protocols and are reluctant to share billing information for fear of losing control of the toll revenue they are due, the experts said.

The biggest obstacle to interoperability, however, is the politics involved, said Neil Gray, director of government affairs for IBTTA, which opposes a federal mandate on interoperability.

“If you look at a map of the nation, E-ZPass is the whole Northeast, you’ve got Sun Pass in Florida, TxPass in Texas and Title 21 [tag system] on the West Coast,” Gray said.

“If somebody wanted to say, ‘OK, the new national tag is E-ZPass, well, that means Florida, Texas, California and everyone in between would have to chuck out their systems and dislocate their entire user base — and politically, that’s just kind of a non-starter,” Gray said.

“Pick any one of them, look at it on a map; do you want to polarize Texas, California, the Northeast?” he asked.

In addition, for a single national tag to work, everyone — including the driving public — might have to throw away the toll tag they already paid for and buy a new one, he said.

IBTTA’s position is to let the industry — the toll agencies and technology providers — address the problem and find solutions to interoperability.

Gray said he believes that regional systems such as E-ZPass, a toll system that now counts 24 toll agencies in 14 states as part of its interoperable network, will evolve — as E-ZPass did — “organically.”

Even when toll agencies join the large E-ZPass network, however, the transition is not always smooth.

In 2009 in Ohio, there were loud protests from truckers and others when that state’s turnpike raised tolls to cover what it said were the costs associated with the transition to electronic tolling and becoming part of the E-ZPass system.

There also can be problems for carriers that have bought into tolling systems that are used by their own states.

At Clark Freight Lines in Pasadena, Texas, operations manager Danny Schnautz recently received a violation notice saying a Clark truck went through a toll site in a neighboring county without paying.

Schnautz said he had to spend precious time sorting out the situation with the toll agency in Chambers County.

“I said, ‘Well, I have a Harris County [toll] tag,’ and they said, ‘Well, it didn’t read.’ ”

Out-of-state tolling is even more time-consuming, Schnautz said, adding that when Clark trucks run to Oklahoma, for instance, that state’s toll system can’t read Texas tags — so drivers must stop, pay the tolls in cash and save receipts so that Clark can reimburse them.

In order to save time and money, Schnautz said that he is going to buy toll tags, or transponders, from various states.

“Trucking is about optimizing things, so we need to optimize [electronic tolling systems] like we do everything else,” he said.

But Clark runs 200 dry vans and flatbeds in 49 states, meaning that it might need lots of tags.