A toll plaza can be a bottleneck on a highway if its capacity is exceeded. The public accepts the notion of a toll to pay for roads but is unwilling to wait in traffic queues to render payment. In view of the time involved in each toll collection transaction, any improvement that can save even a fraction of a second will represent a substantial increase in efficiency. Until August 1994, freeway toll had been collected manually in Korea, but increased freeways and vehicles had brought numerous problems and inefficiency to the manual toll collection system. The Korea Highway Corporation therefore introduced an automatic toll collection (ATC) system to eliminate or reduce the delay at toll plazas in August 1994. The two types of toll collection system - closed and open-barrier systems - have been adopted on Korean freeways. In total, 122 tollgates are operated, 23 tollgates (19%) in an open system and 99 tollgates (81%) in a closed system. This paper mainly deals with the comparison of tollgate service time and toll booth capacity between the two different toll booth systems of the ATC - single and double booths - as well as between the conventional toll collection system manually operated and the ATC system.
Abstract