Influence of ETC on the level-of-service in on-ramp merging sections.

Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) is expected to resolve traffic congestion at tollgates. However, it may newly create another bottleneck of traffic at the merging section in the downstream. This study proposes a methodology to evaluate whether ETC system can raise the level-of-service at on-ramp merging section in total. The level-of-service is evaluated in a newly developed measure based on the drivers' perception. Numerical example shows that the effect of ETC highly depends on the traffic conditions.