Toll Excellence Awards

This project is the first bi-national U.S.-Canada procurement of a toll collection system involving three independent international bridge operators with different ownership structures. The bi-national partnership leveraged a pre-existing bi-national agreement between the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) and The Federal Bridge Corporation Limited (FBCL) at the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge Administration (IBA). The other participating organizations in this project are the Blue Water Bridge (BWB), the Seaway International Bridge Corporation (SIBC), and consultant WSP.

This agreement allowed the creation of a new Memorandum of Understanding connecting all the partners under one contract, issued and administered by the International Bridge Administration (IBA). This project enabled the first technical interoperability across the U.S.-Canada border with customers able to attach multiple accounts in different currencies to a single bi-national sticker tag for ease of travel.

Customers establish an account and purchase a tag from one bridge operator and then may establish accounts with the other two bridge operators in one of the currencies permitted by the bridge operators' business rules. The customer then links their tag with the partner agencies, all through a seamless customer interface. The system is scalable to add other similar toll entities in the future, with each entity retaining their national identity and branding and recognizing their toll collection revenues instantly.

This project represents the first hub-to-hub connection between two regional interoperability hubs (Central and Southeast) within the U.S. tolling industry in which national business rules and national interface standards have been used for processing transactions. The implementation process engaged customer service, communications, financial, legal, and technical teams from both regions working together to ensure the success of this project with a positive impact for our customers. The role of a Regional Hub Custodian was implemented to establish a single point of contact for customer service between regions to oversee reconciliation and settlement of transactions, disputes, and corrections.

• The initial agencies participating from the Southeast Region are Florida's Turnpike Enterprise (FTE), Lee County Florida (LCF), Miami-Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) and Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority (THEA).
• The initial agencies participating from the Central Region are Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (CTRMA), Kansas Turnpike Authority (KTA), North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA), and Oklahoma Turnpike Authority (OTA).

This project involved the creation of a system for safely removing debris from the roadway while protecting Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission employees from being struck by vehicles while working on the roadway. While the agency has had no fatalities while clearing roadway debris, the agency's Risk Management Group determined a high correlation between strain and sprain injuries and the work of removing debris such as dragging deer carcasses or tires.

Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (Commission) employees clear more than 7,000 roadway obstructions each year across the 565-mile roadway system. To remove roadway debris, Commission employees must park their vehicle and walk or run across the roadway to retrieve these items. In these situations, employees run the risk of being struck by oncoming vehicles and suffering injuries from removing debris.

To avoid these safety and health risks, the Commission collaborated with J-Tech Industries to develop LaneBlade, a roadway debris-clearing system that solves the problem of having employees remove roadway debris by hand while dodging heavy traffic. After several years in pilot phase, in 2022, the Commission deployed 12 state-of-the-art LaneBlade road debris removal systems, and another 12 were purchased in 2023.  

View a demo of the LaneBlade: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=813185053005902

"Responsibility Matters" is the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission's (PTC) ongoing initiative to deliver on its core value of instilling "diversity, integrity, and sustainability in all our practices." With a 30-year commitment to sustainable best practices, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (PTC) aims to become America's First Sustainable Superhighway by 2040. To get there, the PTC's employee-led Sustainability Committee evaluates all transportation projects and business processes to help the agency reach its goal.  The Commission formally adopted the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, identifying 17 key areas, including infrastructure, affordable and clean energy, sustainable communities, responsible production and consumption, and climate action. The PTC incorporates these goals into all its decisions and operations. The PTC Sustainability Committee's core responsibilities include: 

• Establishing core principles and goals to guide decision-making and policy development; 
• Developing programmatic approaches and milestones to advance sustainability.
• Promoting sustainability activities at meetings, workshops, and conferences to improve the collaborative culture within and outside the organization.
• Developing specialized workplace training that focuses on local and national sustainability initiatives.
• Identifying funding opportunities to support the sustainability plan.

The Illinois Tollway TIMS2GO Mobile Incident Response Tool is a unique mobile-friendly web application that enables traffic and incident managers to quickly verify incident details, make informed decisions and manage incidents anytime from anywhere using any smartphone, tablet or laptop. TIMS2GO provides instant access to livestreaming video, incident details, and response status updates. It allows traffic managers to share information with Illinois State Police Troop 15, which is responsible for patrolling the Tollway system, and other emergency responders. TIMS2GO also provides traffic data trends, ITS equipment inventory information, and real-time event statistics to help traffic managers make informed decisions. The Tollway began developing TIMS2GO in 2019 to provide traffic and incident managers 24/7 access to the ITS resources available at its Traffic Operations Center (TOC) at headquarters in Downers Grove. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic made it a higher priority. By late 2020, TIMS2GO was fully operational.  

Tollway traffic and incident managers are trained from the start to manage incidents from the TOC, which serves as a central hub to detect, monitor, and manage roadway events anywhere on the 294-mile Illinois Tollway system. An array of TV monitors broadcast live video from a series of digital roadway cameras that can zoom in, pan out, and capture different angles to provide a comprehensive view of any given scene.   The TOC relies on the Traffic and Information Management System (TIMS) advanced traffic management system. This software gathers, processes, and disseminates information from numerous intelligent transportation system technologies throughout the Tollway system to the public, media, and emergency responders via computer-aided dispatch, roadway message signs, and internet-based services such as Twitter and Waze. TIMS2GO puts all of the Tollway’s ITS technologies into the hands of its traffic and incident managers.

The North Texas Tollway Authority's (NTTA) new back-office system processes and reconciles toll transactions on NTTA's approximately 1,100 center lane miles of toll roads, our partners' managed lanes, and from tolling agencies across Texas and four interoperable states. The system also processes parking transactions from two local airports. It enables online account management for transponder and pay-by-mail customers via website and mobile application.

The system was built with a modular architecture for easy integration and "plug-n-play" capabilities to expand and provide toll services to other agencies, third-party payment and fleet providers, and operationally critical services, enabling innovation and enhanced functionality. NTTA's goal was to replace a 20-year-old tolling back-office system with a system that accurately manages data with the highest level of cyber security and data privacy while achieving these key objectives: 1) modular architecture for flexibility with integrations to any number of third-party systems and core services, 2) configurable business rules engine, 3) enhanced customer service options and streamlined processes, 4) expanded capabilities for future innovation, and 5) traceability through the transaction lifecycle.  

The system went live in January 2021 and in 2022 it processed 1 billion transactions and handled $1.6 billion in payments across all channels. In addition, it handled 5.5 million customer calls, 61 million customer communications (i.e., invoice, email, text), and 11.2 million customer logins on NTTA's customer website and mobile application. NTTA achieved its project goal and met the key objectives, and the project is considered a resounding success. The project team consisted of ViaPlus, formerly known as TollPlus (system integrator), North Highland (project management), SDI Presence (quality control), MBI Consulting and Zenisys (technical support), Technologent (infrastructure managed services), and NTTA staff.  In all, 400 people and 650,000 hours of work, including 175 NTTA employees across eight departments supported the project.

A common challenge for all tolling programs is collecting payments from unregistered users. This usually leads to high management costs, impacts reputation, and results in revenue leakage and non-compliance from unpaid invoices. Smart, intelligent, free-flowing mobility solutions are pointless if they don't consistently and cost-effectively maximize revenues. Increasing payment rates reduces costs for tolling authorities and their customers.  Smart Enforcement aimed to tackle these challenges, thus resulting in reduced costs and improved debt recovery and customer experience. Since then, emovis has deployed Smart Enforcement in different projects. In each project, it was important to answer these questions: 

• Are we using the most accurate source of information to find and contact the customer?
• Is it possible to predict the payment behavior of our customers? 
• Can we pre-empt and adapt the actions we take to reduce management costs?  
• Can we identify a preferred course of action to increase the likelihood of payment?

When we first introduced Smart Enforcement in the UK in 2020 and the following year in Chile, we saw a quick and sustained reduction in enforcement costs. This improvement came from the use of artificial intelligence to better understand customer behavior, to predict their future payments, and take advantage of machine learning to achieve a more intelligent collection process. Later we also integrated our solution with external third parties that we used to track motorists' new addresses. This immediately brought an increase in accuracy, thus reducing the work and expense of undeliverable mail together with an increase in toll compliance, in particular from unregistered users who are less likely to pay. Being more accurate with the enforcement activity allows the customer to make payments before the unpaid invoice escalates to recovery by an external agent, leading to savings in print, mail, and debt recovery costs.