Electronic Toll Research Articles

Influences of traffic volumes and wind speeds on ambient ultrafine particle levels—Observations at a highway electronic toll collection (ETC) lane

The levels of ultrafine particles (UFPs) and their size distributions on a highway electronic toll collection (ETC) lane were measured from October 30 to November 1 and November 5 to November 6, 2008. The hourly UFP levels measured at the highway ETC lane were 1.3 × 104–1.9 × 105 particles cm−3 (mean = 9.4 × 104 particles cm−3). Compared with urban UFP levels, average UFP levels at the highway ETC lane were about 5–10 times higher than those previously measured in urban areas, indicating that a considerable amount of UFPs were exhausted from vehicles. At the highway ETC lane, the average UFP number size distribution had a dominant mode at about 10 nm and a minor mode at about 33 nm. Measurement results indicate that nucleation mode particles remained at relatively high levels compared to Aitken mode and accumulation mode particles at the highway ETC lane. This study identifies the impacts of traffic volumes and wind speeds on ambient UFP levels. Measurement results show that the elevated UFP levels resulting from traffic volume decreased exponentially as wind speed increased on the highway when wind speed was <2.0 m s−1. However, the elevated UFP levels resulting from traffic volume increased slightly when wind speed was >2.0 m s−1 due to local turbulent mixing causes UFPs at high wind speeds. According to measurement results, high levels of UFP were observed at low wind speeds and under high traffic volumes.

Numerical evaluation of pollutant dispersion at a toll plaza based on system dynamics and Computational Fluid Dynamics models

The health of tollbooth workers is seriously threatened by long-term exposure to polluted air from vehicle exhausts. Using traffic data collected at a toll plaza, vehicle movements were simulated by a system dynamics model with different traffic volumes and toll collection procedures. This allowed the average travel time of vehicles to be calculated. A three-dimension Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model was used with a k– ε turbulence model to simulate pollutant dispersion at the toll plaza for different traffic volumes and toll collection procedures. It was shown that pollutant concentration around tollbooths increases as traffic volume increases. Whether traffic volume is low or high (1500 vehicles/h or 2500 vehicles/h), pollutant concentration decreases if electronic toll collection (ETC) is adopted. In addition, pollutant concentration around tollbooths decreases as the proportion of ETC-equipped vehicles increases. However, if the proportion of ETC-equipped vehicles is very low and the traffic volume is not heavy, then pollutant concentration increases as the number of ETC lanes increases.

Enhancing surveillance strategies for childhood self-reporting data

ProblemInvestigators routinely incorporate youth self-report data into cohort studies with variable results. Our study successfully employed strategies to ensure data quality and reduce participant fatigue.MethodsA longitudinal study of rural youth...

Behavioral investigation on the factors that determine adoption of an electronic toll collection system: Passenger car users

This paper describes the results of an investigation of the factors that shape the decision by passenger car users of a tolled facility to use an electronic toll collection (ETC) system. The paper is based on revealed data collected in the New York City area, that were analysed with the assistance of discrete choice models. The results provide insight into the nature of the underlying decision making process. A number of results stand out. The first one is that the time saved by using ETC at the toll booths does not play a statistically significant role in the decision to use ETC. This result is conceptually correct because: (1) the time saved at the toll booths when using ETC is a relatively small portion of the total travel time in the hyper-congested network in the New York City area and (2) the actual time saved is curtailed by upstream congestion that makes it difficult for drivers to reach the ETC-only toll booths, and by downstream congestion that frequently prevents driver from crossing the toll booths. The second set of results is related to the perceived financial benefits of using ETC. Two variables were found to play a significant role in increasing ETC use: the toll savings (the difference between cash and ETC tolls), and drivers’ awareness of the toll discounts offered. Other socio-economic attributes have a direct relationship with the likelihood of using ETC: the number of trips made through the facilities, auto ownership, college education, age, and income. The results also indicate significant differences by ethnicity as racial minorities (i.e., African–Americans and Hispanics) are less inclined to use ETC than Caucasians. From the policy standpoint, these results imply that in order to increase ETC use, the difference between cash and ETC tolls should be increased, and accompanied with outreach campaigns to raise awareness of the toll discounts available to ETC users. The underrepresentation of ethnic minorities should also be addressed by implementing specially designed outreach efforts to gain insight into the factors that shape their attitude toward ETC. Taken together, the results in the paper—and in a companion paper that focuses on freight users—provide clear suggestions that could be used to increase ETC use, and enable the transportation system to fully exploit the potential benefits of such an important technology.

Evaluating the energy performance of a SUV hybrid electric vehicle

This paper analyzes the energetic performance of the hybrid Lexus RX 400h, through on-board measurements. Several speed profiles were analyzed, for three driving types, successive stop and go cycles, three speed profiles, crossing an electronic toll collection booth, and a roundabout. In stop and go situations the internal combustion engine did not work (the torque needed to impulse the vehicle in the stop and go situations was only supported by the electric engines), as well as in the situations of constant low speeds (50 or 60 km h −1). The auxiliary support given by the electric engines in the accelerations, as well as the importance of the energy regeneration system on the batteries’ load recovery is also demonstrated. When compared with similar conventional vehicles, the Lexus RX 400h has lower combined energy consumption between 1.2% and 60%.

ETC Data Based Traffic Information Mining Techniques

The electronic toll collection (ETC) system is an importation subsystem in the intelligent transportation system (ITS). It can continuously record the time of vehicles entering or departuring from the certain toll station. Based on the charge transaction data of ETC system, this paper analyzed the original data and determined the data processing flow of ETC Data. Then, it proposed the travel speed calculation model of freeway, the traffic flow distribution analysis method, the information mining techniques of OD distribution, vehicle type proportion in different toll gate, and so on. The research finally took the ETC data of Beijing city in 2008 as an example, and carried a case analysis. The result indicated that the data processing and the index extraction techniques proposed in this research can accurately gain the information which is necessary in the freeway operation and management. These provide effective decision-making support for the freeway travelers' information service and the highway traffic operation and the plan.

On the Initiation of World Neurosurgery

Nowadays, the diffusion of in-car navigators, location-enabled smartphones and various reasons for tracking vehicles – either for insurance and recovery, fleet management or for electronic tolling – are making floating car data (FCD) a leading solution for traffic monitoring. In the next years, this solution might be much more strengthened by the introduction and diffusion of black boxes, installed on commercial or private vehicles devoted to monitor or validate new safety technologies (e.g., the automatic in-vehicle emergency call service eCall in Europe).1 FCD, possibly integrated with data coming from infrastructure-based monitoring systems, represents a valuable platform for intelligent transport systems (ITS). Traffic monitoring based on FCD relies on a processing algorithm for aggregating the measured data into an accurate and complete traffic map. In this paper we present an experimental study on FCD processing based on a unique large amount of data in Italy, provided by heavy-duty vehicles used as probes over the Italian A4 motorway. A processing procedure is proposed for identifying the typical speed patterns, to be used as baseline for automatic anomaly detection, transport planning or traffic analysis applications. A first assessment based on real traffic-event information shows that the comparison of the probe data to previously identified historical speed patterns allows a clear detection of anomalous events.

Road Accidents Prevention and Detection

To realize the value of one second, ask the person who has survived an accident.” Transportation plays a key role in development of a country. Travel, mainly road travel is inevitable to any individual. With at least 13 people dying every hour on Indian roads, India had topped the global list of deaths in road accidents (global status report, WHO). Roads are the key access to many places. Places situated over the mountain ranges are sometimes accessible only by roads. Thus ghat roads play a important role in the road transport system. In Ghat roads, the major accident prone zones are Uturns where the approach of vehicles in opposite direction is almost invisible which results in fatal accidents. Besides prevention, the acknowledgement of accidents is a major problem due to poor communication facilities. India doesn’t have a scientific traffic engineering which forms the basis of road safety improvement. Though many conventional methods were implemented, they proved largely unsuccessful. We propose a scientific approach to this problem. Our proposal to prevent this phenomenon is to detect the vehicles approaching the turn by using sensors and to warn the vehicles in opposite direction. To detect the occurred accidents in time, we use electronic toll systems. K. Surya Teja AV hostel345, ECE-III year Sastra University, Tanjore Tamilnadu-613402, India The full text of the article is not available in the cache. Kindly refer the IJCA digital library at www.ijcaonline.org for the complete article. In case, you face problems while downloading the full-text, please send a mail to editor at editor@ijcaonline.org

Addressing Equity in Political Debates over Road Pricing

Recent technological advances have made it easier and cheaper to charge vehicles for road use, and indeed electronic roadway tolling applications are gradually increasing worldwide. Although road pricing holds the promise of reducing congestion, emissions, and fuel use while raising needed revenues, the growth in toll programs and projects is halting and falls short of a groundswell. The idea remains generally unpopular with businesses, voters, and the people whom they elect. One of the concerns about road pricing is unfairness. While considerable ink has been spilled on the philosophical and empirical dimensions of road pricing, less has been written on how equity concerns have been addressed in practice. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing the broader road pricing equity literature and examining road pricing case studies in which equity debates played a prominent role. Four strategies have proven important to mitigating equity concerns and overcoming opposition to road pricing: addressing equity issues in planning, building support from the public and interest groups, establishing trust between elected officials and transportation agencies before project development, and enlisting the support of influential constituencies for toll revenues. The politics of transportation finance, especially road pricing, is complex and contentious, making it difficult to separate measurable equity outcomes from perceptions of fairness and beliefs about tolling from tactics to avoid paying them. However, the gradual operational and political success of a growing number of road pricing projects suggests that equity concerns can be satisfactorily addressed.

Effects of road pricing on commuters' behaviour: a cross-country analysis

To relieve urban congestion, road pricing has been practiced in major cities such as London and Singapore for a number of years. Taiwan, as a typical Asian country, has been using electronic toll collection as a way to reduce congestion at toll plaza along national freeways, with possible plans of extending it to congested urban roads for congestion management. In this study, we examined the differences in perception of auto/motorbike commuters in Taiwan and Singapore using SP and RP surveys to investigate how they responded to different road pricing scenarios. Discrete choice models were employed to compare the important factors influencing commuters' behaviour with respect to different road pricing scenarios, representing pre- and post-implementation conditions in these two Asian countries.

Mitigation of expressway traffic congestion through transportation demand management with toll discount

The result of four transportation demand management (TDM) implementations in three major traffic concentration periods of 2007-2008 with discounts on tolls for electronic toll collection vehicles, as intended to mitigate traffic congestion in an uninterrupted flow section of the Tomei expressway is described. As a result of the TDM implementation, the peak-hour demand is estimated to decrease by 2-5-. Although traffic congestion continues to occur, partly because of the increased daily traffic demand and the insufficient shift of traffic demand from peak hours to off-peak hours, it is estimated that the total delay is reduced by 27-35- relative to the case in which there is no TDM implementation, resulting in a reduction in CO 2 emission of 6-8- and 65 ton-c for the four TDM implementations. It is seen that the average shift rate of traffic increases with the amount of the toll discount. Apparently, it is also difficult to expect a high shift rate of traffic if the amount of the discount is less than approximately 1000 yen. The estimated midpoint arc elasticity of the toll-discount time period ranges from -0.30 to -0.72, depending upon the holiday type and the details of the discount time period.

Intelligent Transport Systems in Commercial Vehicle Operations

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is the application of computers, communications and sensor technology to improve the efficiency or safety of surface transportation systems. The ITS initiative has been taken up by most developed countries including US, Canada, Australia and the European Union. This paper introduces ITS and its vision to save time, money and human lives. ITS can be applied to the entire spectrum of the transportation industry. This includes Freeway, Incident &amp; Emergency Management, Electronic Toll Collection, Arterial Management, Travelers Information Systems, Advanced Public Transportation Systems, Commercial Vehicle Operations, etc. However the primary focus in this paper is on introducing the application of ITS technologies in the realm of Commercial Vehicle Operations (CVO). The paper covers the three major capability areas namely safety information exchange, electronic screening and electronic credentialing, giving details on the ongoing initiatives and the different technologies applied in the respective areas as well as the benefits offered by the same. The ITS initiative has caught up in a big way in the United States. The U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) has sponsored and undertaken a program called Commercial Vehicle Information Systems and Networks (CVISN) Model Deployment Initiative (MDI). The goal of the CVISN initiative has been to assist each state in US to achieve "ambitious but achievable" level of deployment of ITS technology in all the three areas of commercial vehicle operations by establishing an organizational framework among state agencies and motor carriers for cooperative system development and creating a CVISN design architecture which can evolve and accommodate new technologies.

Privacy Implications of Automated GPS Tracking and Profiling

The automobile has gradually evolved from an analog machine with mostly mechanical and hydraulic components to an electronic system with a growing number of computer-based systems. Within this "smart car" revolution, GPS vehicle navigation has attracted significant attention. There are efforts underway to use GPS vehicle navigation infrastructure for additional value-added services, for instance, mobility pricing of insurance infrastructure-less electronic toll collection, and GPS enabled parking fee collection. This article aims to raise awareness about privacy issues created as a result of GPS-based surveillance by conducting an experiment involving collecting positional data from a number of volunteers. A software protocol is implemented that takes this GPS data as input and generates a range of personal information about the individual including their home addresses, and social and work activities.

Motorway travel time prediction based on toll data and weather effect integration

This study reports the main findings of the Travel time Prediction based on electronic Toll collection (ETC) data with wEather effect integration on mOtorways (TPTEO) project aiming at developing and implementing a route planner tool and travel time prediction system on the interurban motorway network managed by French motorway AREA Company. One of the main innovative characteristics of this project is the use of toll collection data (TCD) to derive speed and travel time estimation and prediction. This data source is becoming more and more available on motorway facilities and provides an efficient way not only to estimate and predict travel time but also to achieve the origin–destination (OD) matrices elaboration and exhibit trends in traffic. Based on the previous studies on weather effect quantification, the prediction algorithm is designed to account for the weather impact during the prediction process. The resulting tool is considered to be accurate enough and paves the way for developing weather responsive advanced traffic management and information systems.

The Pilot Project of the National Automatic Toll Collection System

The paper refers to some problems of European Electronic Tolling Service (EETS) implementation in Poland. Motor Transport Institute has developed the structure of the National Automatic Toll Collection System (NATCS). It consists of National Automatic Toll Collection Centre (NATCC), OBU and control subsystem. NATCS system is based on a combination of mobile communications using the GSM-GPRS standard technology, the satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) and 5, 8 GHz microwave technology. An innovative element of NATCS is the On-Board Unit (OBU), which automatically calculates the amount of charge due taking into account the vehicle category (admissible weight, number of axles), road distance and the emissions class (ecological aspect). OBU is equipped with GPS, GSM and DSRC module, so it is interoperable with other EETS in member states of EU. The control subsystem distinguishes between automatic enforcement through control gates, enforcement by mobile teams, and patrol teams. This presented kind of system is the best solution for Poland because of unique capabilities.

A 5.8 GHz Integrated CMOS Dedicated Short Range Communication Transceiver for the Korea/Japan Electronic Toll Collection System

In this paper, a RF front-end of the 5.8 GHz integrated CMOS dedicated short range communication (DSRC) transceiver for the Korea/Japan electronic toll collection system is presented. The receiver uses low-IF conversion architecture for high sensitivity and low-power consumption while the transmitter uses direct up-conversion architecture for its simple structure and reliability. To solve image problem in the low-IF receiver, 10 MHz IF and 40 MHz IF are chosen for Korean and Japanese DSRC standards, respectively, since they make no image signals exist in image band. A single-quadrature mixer with the proposed transconductor-type quadrature generator in RF signal path is also adopted which has accurate quadrature characteristic in 5.8 GHz frequency. When the RF front-end of the integrated 5.8 GHz DSRC transceiver is implemented using 0.13 μm CMOS technology, the receiver achieves the overall noise figure of less than 5 dB with image rejection ratio of more than 30 dB, and the transmitter carries an output peak power of 10 dBm with the adjacent channel power ratio of -43 dBc. The RF front-end of the 5.8 GHz DSRC transceiver dissipates 45 mA with 1.2 V supply voltage and 142 mA with 1.2/3.3 V dual supply voltage during RXand TX-modes, respectively.

Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass

We exploit the introduction of electronic toll collection, (E-ZPass), which greatly reduced both traffic congestion and vehicle emissions near highway toll plazas. We show that the introduction of E-ZPass reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers (km) of a toll plaza by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, relative to mothers 2–10 km from a toll plaza. There were no immediate changes in the characteristics of mothers or in housing prices near toll plazas that could explain these changes. The results are robust to many changes in specification and suggest that traffic congestion contributes significantly to poor health among infants. (JEL I12, J13, Q51, Q53, R41)

8.1.1 People, Policy and Technology: Considerations in Designing a Robust Security Framework

AbstractThis paper analyses the process which was employed in defining the security architecture for a latest‐generation Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system. It focuses on one fundamental operational requirement – the non‐repudiation of transactional data and the evidence of travel in support of the enforcement of tolling events – and uses this to highlight the essential integration between technological capability and operational processes in delivering a secure solution.Put simply: in a market of off‐the‐shelf security “solutions”, it is essential at the enterprise level to recognise that security is a process, not a product.The interactions between technical and technological capabilities, operational policies, people and business processes must be tightly aligned in order to demonstrate that the enterprise has achieved the non‐repudiation of transactional data, and has a sound basis for tolling.

Aggregate Fuel Consumption Model of Light-Duty Vehicles for Evaluating Effectiveness of Traffic Management Strategies on Fuels

The primary objective of this research is to develop a practical model for evaluating the effects of traffic management on fuel efficiency. The relationships between the real-world driving activities, the vehicle specific power, and the corresponding fuel consumptions are analyzed based on the data of 26 gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas-fueled light-duty vehicles (LDVs). Then, an indicator for evaluating the level of fuel consumption is designed by dividing the normalized fuel consumption by the fuel use in the most economic scenario. An aggregate model is developed following the design of the indicator that features minimal input requirement and meaningful output for LDVs. In the case studies, the proposed model is applied to estimating and comparing the fuel efficiency of several driving cycles, evaluating the fuel efficiency improvement resulting from the electronic toll collection system, and developing temporal variations of fuel efficiency for a road in Beijing by using floating car data. Finally, the merits of the proposed model are discussed, and the limitations and recommendations are provided for further model improvement.

Privacy-value-control harmonization for RFID adoption in retail

Privacy concerns have, at least in part, impeded the adoption of radio frequency identification (RFID) in retail. The adoption of other automatic identification (auto-ID) applications shows that consumers often are willing to trade their privacy or their control of personal information against some value afforded by the application. In this paper, the interplay between privacy, value, and control is examined through a literature survey of four auto-ID applications: mobile phone, electronic toll collection, e-passports, and loyalty programs. The consumer value proposition for the use of RFID in retail is investigated through an online survey exploring end-user perceptions. The results of the survey are: 1) the customer value proposition has not been communicated well to customers; 2) privacy concerns are higher than other previously adopted applications despite similar privacy issues; and 3) harmonization of privacy, value, and control is likely to be achieved only after adoption, when customers will be educated through experience with the application.