This article describes the world's first all-electronic toll collection system, which is due to open in January 1997 on Highway 407 in Toronto, Canada. The new toll road will cover 69km between Highways 403 and 48, and ease traffic congestion in Toronto's metropolitan area. It will offer drivers convenience and efficiency, as well as connections to the many towns in the greater Toronto area. It will have 128 interchanges and 120 bridges, and initially have capacity for about 55,000 vehicles per day. Its electronic toll collection (ETC) system will use the Slotted Aloha TDMA telecommunications protocol, which gives transponders a communications frame of 0.01s, repeating 100 times per second. This provides 99.995% accuracy in the high speeds, close spacing, and multilane conditions that the toll road will have. The toll road's aboveground active sensor system will provide a very reliable vehicle detection system, by using the optical equivalent of radar sensors. The roadside system will have the following elements: (1) a vehicle detector and classifier; (2) licence plate cameras; (3) an integrated roadside unit; and (4) antennas. The toll transaction processor (TTP) will gather data from all the integrated roadside units, analyse this data, and send it to the revenue management system (RMS).
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