The cashless toll road is already a reality, providing fully automatic tolling at highway speeds in a free-flow environment where lane changing is unrestricted. This article discusses such a system, which has been operating on Highway 407 in Toronto, Canada for over a year, with complete success. The system's revenues have exceeded expectation, and indicate strong road user support for electronic toll collection (ETC). The article describes the system design, architecture, roadside toll collection system, transaction processing, revenue management, enforcement, operations centre, and operational experience. Drivers are allowed to use the highway without transponders, because the system discriminates between vehicles with and without transponders, and captures video images of the licence plates of the latter. Each toll monitoring point has two gantries and roadside electronics equipment. The downstream gantry contains all electronic tolling and classification equipment, and the upstream gantry contains the cameras and lights used to record licence plate images. The transponder locator creates tracks of all transponder-equipped vehicles as they approach the downstream gallery. The volume of transponder-equipped traffic has increased continuously since the highway opened.
Abstract