Ministry of Construction and the four major highway public corporations started to develop ETC system in 1994, and the first operation finally started in April 2000. The government economic stimulus package describes deployment of ETC to about 900 toll plazas out of the total 1300 across the nation by March 2003, where higher cost benefit is expected. ETC systems have been introduced already in many other countries, however this in Japan's case will be an unprecedented attempt to introduce large scale ETC systems in a short term. The system introduction provides multiple OBE (On-Board Equipment) manufacturers with an opportunity to penetrate into the ETC market under the nationwide interoperable systems. This paper describes the development of ETC system, the first introduction of the system in April 2000 with many OBE manufacturers, and the nationwide ETC deployment plan.
Samenvatting