Stuck In 2nd Gear
E-ZPass and the Future of Driving

The Wire, Cover Story, March 31, 2004

The interstate highway system is, at its best, the very symbol of modern transportation: fast, flexible and individual, allowing us to move across the land as easily as thought. Yet all it takes for that freedom to become an impenetrable solid barrier—a thousand-car prison of frustration, anger and powerlessness—is a single toll.

If you live on the Seacoast and travel I-95 during the summer, sooner or later you’ll find yourself sitting in a vehicular cell, breathing hot, gritty, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide rather than the cool, salty sea breeze that is less than five miles to the east.

I-95 and I-495 northbound converge in northern Massachusetts and cross the border into New Hampshire as a great swath of roadway four lanes wide in each direction. And though traffic is thick, it easily flows along at or above the 65 mph speed limit as it enters New Hampshire. Then it hits the Hampton tolls.

I am originally from New Jersey, though I’ve lived on the Seacoast for four years. I’ve been an E-ZPass user since 1996, and when I hand tokens to the attendants at the Hampton tolls I occasionally ask if and when E-ZPass is going to be installed. Since I started asking in the winter of 2000, the answer has invariably been the same: “next spring.” And every spring when I ask again, the schedule has been pushed back to “next spring” once again.

Even now, that answer is the same. Bill Boynton, the public information officer at the New Hampshire Department of Transportation, says that an electronic toll collection system “will be online by December 2004 or spring 2005.”

There is something about that answer now, though, that seems more realistic. The state has pushed into motion a number of necessary provisions: on March 17 the House voted 245-74 to reduce the discount for New Hampshire tokens from 50 percent to 20 percent; to add a 40 percent discount for payment via electronic collection; and to create a set of laws to deal with evasion of tolls when E-ZPass is implemented. The Senate will now consider the bill.

In December 2002 the DOT released a Request for Proposal for implementation and deployment of E-ZPass. In August 2003, Gov. Craig Benson and the Executive Council awarded a contract for the system to The Revenue Markets, Inc.

It looks like the long wait may soon be over.

The Great American Highway
In the last 30 years the number of automobiles in this country has grown at a rate over twice that of the population. At the same, time road capacity has only increased by 6 percent, notes John Seabrook in “The Slow Lane,” his investigation of New York Metropolitan traffic in the Sept. 2, 2002 issue of the New Yorker.

In a country that has been car-crazy for more than a century, conditions for driving have spiraled downward since the great national interstate highways were constructed during the 1950s. The attitude of highway agencies has been to add vehicle capacity with concrete—build a highway, let it fill up, and come back in 20 years to add another lane.

One way we’ve paid for these roads is through tolls. For millennia, it’s been considered to be an equitable system in that the people who use the roadway are paying directly for their use of it. In theory it makes sense, but in actuality it causes a number of problems. Tolls need to be collected, which causes delays, traffic backups, and accidents.

What’s An E-ZPass?
In 1993 a new-fangled piece of technology called E-ZPass was installed on the toll section of the New York Thruway from Woodbury to Albany. Electronic toll collection was a revolutionary idea and saved a good deal of time for all the New Jerseyites headed north for weekend ski trips to Vermont. Instead of waiting at a toll-induced bottleneck created by the toll barrier at exit 16, it was possible to fight through the crowd to get to the empty lane “For E-ZPass Only” and scoot through the toll area without stopping or searching for change.

There used to be a car commercial that featured a fantasy world where a driver named Bob could pass through a tollbooth without slowing down, and a neon sign would greet him by name. A decade later this has become nearly a literal reality.

E-ZPass has grown and expanded from Virginia to Massachusetts to become the largest electronic toll collection network in the country. Maine is revamping its Speedpass system to become E-ZPass compatible this year, and New Hampshire has become a full member of the E-ZPass Interagency group (IAG), a step necessary to install E-ZPass and make it interoperable and have reciprocity with all other IAG members.

Once E-ZPass is installed in New Hampshire, you can call a phone number or log on to www.ezpass.com to sign up for the service. You can either prepay to put credits on your account or hook up your account to a credit card that will automatically replenish itself whenever your balance dips below a set amount. Then a palm-sized transponder will arrive in the mail that you attach via enclosed Velcro strips to the windshield behind the rear view mirror.

When passing through an E-ZPass tollbooth, an antenna will read the vehicle and account information contained in your transponder and the proper toll amount will be deducted from the corresponding account in the millisecond it takes to pass through the booth. Although the low speed E-ZPass system that will most likely be installed at the Hampton Tolls will probably be posted at 10 mph, the scanners are capable of working reliably with cars passing by at 50, 60, even 80 mph.

The Architecture of Speed
This new method of toll collection may even change the way highways are built.
A few years ago Exit 6 on the New Jersey Turnpike was rebuilt. Exit 6 connects to the eastern terminus of the Pennsylvania Turnpike just north of Philadelphia. The new tollbooth is not as wide as the old one—in fact there is now just one express E-ZPass lane in either direction. But here the E-ZPass lane is the left-most lane and is separated from the other toll lanes starting several hundred yards before the plaza. Since the lane is in the middle of the roadway, no tollbooth employees have to cross the dangerous path, and drivers in the left lane on the highway do not have to fight with slower traffic to get to an E-ZPass lane on the right. E-ZPass traffic rarely slows down below the posted speed limit through the toll. Violators who use the E-ZPass lane without an account set off an overhead camera that takes a high resolution picture of their license plate and sends a fine to whomever the vehicle is registered. The fine is severe enough to keep most drivers from doing it more than once, and the system is working well enough that seven more high-speed toll plazas have been built or are in the planning stages for the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway at high traffic toll areas. There are similar high-speed systems in place in Colorado, Texas, Delaware, Virginia and California.

In Canada, they’ve actually taken it one step further. Highway 407 is a new express toll route opened in 1997 that creates a bypass around the north side of Toronto. Since the highway was a brand-new construction, there were no existing tollbooths to work with and no need to build them. In what is called high-speed barrierless electronic toll collection, an overhead gantry and a system of cameras scans every vehicle and takes a high-resolution picture of the license plate. Then a bill is sent to the owner of the vehicle for the proper toll amount. When the roadway first opened, no one had a transmitter or had signed up for an account. But many motorists quickly signed up for the service when they realized they could avoid mailing in toll payments and an additional $3.50 fee per toll that they were billed for otherwise. As of June 2003, over 550,000 transponders have been distributed; even if drivers don’t have an account they still end up paying, and the payment never, ever causes a traffic jam.

Touch and Go in Hampton
New Hampshire tolls gross the state $60 million per year. The Hampton toll is one of the most efficient in the state, netting the state up to $250,000 on a summer weekend. Opened as the New Hampshire Turnpike in 1950 and widened in the early 1970s, I-95 is at least four lanes wide along its entire 15.8-mile length. It has wide shoulders and a spacious grassy median. Named the Blue Star Memorial Highway in honor of the fallen New Hampshire soldiers of World War II, it is a beautiful piece of highway that is almost never in need of repair. There are rarely any backups on the highway anywhere other than at the Hampton tollbooths.

On a crowded summer afternoon last August, somewhere amongst the thousands of cars fighting touch and go traffic, was New Hampshire’s new governor, Craig Benson. Being a man who has the power to do something more productive than giving a toll worker a dirty look after sitting in traffic for an hour on a sweltering day, he made it a priority to fast-track a change. A week later, on August 21, 2003, the Executive Council approved a resolution that set into motion a one-way toll experiment at the Hampton tolls that would begin the next day and last until Nov. 1. Instead of collecting $1 from each automobile (or $1 per axle for commercial vehicles) in each direction, Benson doubled the toll on the northbound side and eliminated it on the southbound side. The 16 toll lanes, which are normally divided into roughly eight in each direction, were shifted so that there were just four free-flowing southbound lanes and eleven northbound toll lanes. With 3-4 extra toll lanes the northbound backup was reduced from over five miles on previous Labor Day weekends to a maximum of a mile and a half. Southbound traffic was never reported to be stopped in the toll area whatsoever.

Sounds like a slam dunk. The drivers win. The environment wins. The state still gets its funding. But that depends on whom you ask.

One-way tolling is a logical choice in many instances. Philadelphia bridges over the Delaware River, all of the Hudson River crossings into New York City—the Holland and Lincoln Tunnel, the George Washington and Tappan Zee Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. But at all of those places there are no alternative routes. In New Hampshire, I-95 is not the only north/south route along the Seacoast. And in order to save an $8 toll, commercial trucks began diverting off I-95 onto an already overcrowded Route 1 as soon as the northbound toll doubled. Over the 10-week experiment, data in the “One-Way Toll Report” released on March 10 by the NH Department of Transportation indicates that traffic in the northbound direction of I-95 declined by 6.1 percent (or an average of 1,300 vehicles per day) over the same period in 2002. The DOT reported a $180,000 gross loss (3.6 percent) over 2002 figures during the experiment.

One-way tolling also had an impact on the tollbooth workers. The 31 full-time Hampton Toll Plaza attendants’ schedules were unaffected, but the 72 part-time toll attendants’ hours were reduced roughly by half, so that some of them were only getting 10 hours of work per week. The temporary work-hour reductions lowered costs by $47,000 over the test period. The labor savings offset the gross loss to create an overall $133,000 net revenue loss, or a projected $596,000 annually if the one-way tolling were to be made permanent.

NH’s Version of E-ZPass
Despite past disagreements about one-way tolling, Benson and the DOT are both fully behind E-ZPass.

“(The governor) is excited about E-ZPass. He thinks that with a combination of one-way tolls and E-ZPass we’ll really be able to significantly reduce the traffic problems over at the Hampton Tolls,” said Wendell Packard, Benson’s spokesman.

Transportation Commissioner Carol Murray said that “E-ZPass is something we need in our system regardless of one-way tolling.”

Cost estimates are hazy. Low-speed E-ZPass installation is projected to start around $20-$30 million statewide, most of which is being paid for with federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAC) gas tax funds. The state is looking for additional ways to defray that cost. That’s the reason given for lowering the New Hampshire token discount from 50 percent to 20 percent. Opponents call that a sneaky way to raise the cost of driving New Hampshire’s toll highways by 60 percent for the 55 percent of drivers who use tokens. But it should be an incentive for drivers to sign up for E-ZPass to receive a 40 percent discount. One of the useful aspects of E-ZPass is that it will be simple to extend the discount only to New Hampshire E-ZPass users while charging full price to out-of-state E-ZPass users.

E-ZPass doesn’t have to be limited to tolls. For the past two years, two McDonald’s restaurants on Long Island in New York have been accepting E-ZPass as payment. Transponders can just as easily be used to pay for parking or gasoline. The money for purchases is taken out of the holders’ E-ZPass account, just like tolls. House Bill 1325 would allow for this sort of marketing of E-ZPass in New Hampshire. A small fee would be charged for any such transactions, helping to defray the cost of E-ZPass installation. Transportation Commissioner Murray sees a lot of potential.

“We’ve gotten used to using credit cards. I don’t write many checks anymore, and I think we are going to react the same way to using our E-ZPass transponders to pay for things. You could pay your parking fees at Manchester Airport or get a bus ticket at Pease Intermodal Center,” she said.

The state needs to decide whether to install traditional low-speed E-ZPass or the high-speed barrierless version. The low-speed version is cheaper, but traffic must still slow to 10mph so it will do nothing on its own to ease the congestion at the tolls.

Bob Landman, vice-chairman of the Seacoast Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is involved in the project in a regional planning capacity, has been advocating for the state to bite the bullet and invest in the high-speed system now.
“I’m an electrical engineer. If you’ve got 100 amps of electricity and use a 10-amp fuse it’s going to blow. If you want 100 amps to go through a circuit you put in a 100-amp fuse,” said Landman.

Commissioner Murray says that the state will be installing the low-speed version first, before even thinking about any permanent one-way toll in Hampton, and that all of the technology can be retrofitted with high speed E-ZPass at a later date.
public opinion

Benson has been pushing to make the one-way tolling in Hampton permanent. He added $3.5 million to the state’s 10-year plan last fall to demolish the four southbound tollbooths to allow a free flow of traffic. This, of course, would mean there is no turning back. Executive Councilor Ruth Griffin (R-Portsmouth) prevailed in having the item removed from the 10-year plan in December before Benson put it back on and sent it to the Legislature.

Like many in the Seacoast area, Griffin feels that the public should have a say before any permanent decisions are made.

She will be attending two public hearings on the subject that have been scheduled by the DOT on April 7 at 7 p.m. at Hampton Falls Town Hall and on April 8 at 7 p.m. at Portsmouth City Hall.

“I’ve always respected the opinion of the public and it weighs heavily on my decisions. There was none of that before the one-way tolls went in last year,” Griffin said.
Regarding the governor’s proposal to make one-way tolling permanent, she says, “I just feel a little uncomfortable thinking that it might be a foregone conclusion that everybody in the world including the Department of Transportation is in favor of what they are proposing.”

The governor, the transportation commissioner and the DOT at this point are looking to reinstitute the one-way toll experiment again this summer, most likely from Memorial Day to Columbus Day. Some of the criticisms of last year’s toll experiment are that it was instituted so quickly—it didn’t allow for any comparative statistics—and that it only lasted ten weeks—the data seems to indicate that the diversion to Route 1 that was created by the doubled toll was decreasing over time, but the short time frame makes it impossible to tell for sure.

“We can’t answer all the questions that the communities had in the Seacoast (about) what happened with diversion,” said Commissioner Murray. A five-month experiment this summer with additional traffic counters on side roads would generate more complete statistical analysis.

One of the strongest motivations to try one-way tolling again this summer is that E-ZPass will not yet be installed. The only other option is to go back to five-mile backups on I-95. One-way tolling will also help the state make a more informed decision as to whether to do one-way tolling permanently in combination with E-ZPass in the future.

The diversion onto Route 1 and accompanying loss of revenue seem to be acceptable collateral damage from the state’s point of view. The data indicates that diversion will decrease over time as drivers realize that it isn’t worth spending an hour fighting their way up Route 1 to save $2. And the governor will continue to push for it regardless of Seacoast communities’ feelings.

“The governor has welcomed all input on the issue, but understands that the state is best served through one-way tolling combined with E-ZPass,” said Packard.

Sidebar: Will Big Brother Collect Your Toll?
E-ZPass offers a better future at the toll booths, but civil liberties advocates see a dangerous potential in electronic toll collection.

An E-ZPass account is linked to a whole range of personal information besides a name and license plate number—credit card number, bank account information, address, etc. E-ZPass tags could be used to track individuals’ movements through billing records, or even, in a not-too-distant technological future, as a locator beacon tracked via satellite. Such a system is already in use in Switzerland to track commercial trucks, measure their weight and charge a toll fee per kilometer traveled on any roadway in the country. Police are already using E-ZPass records to solve crimes in Massachusetts.

The standardization of DSRC (designated short range communications) by the federal government over the next few years will create a wellspring of possibilities. A national standard transponder will make all electronic toll collection systems interoperable, so that a single transponder will work everywhere in the U.S., as well as in Canada and Mexico. Transponders will be built into all new vehicles by 2006 or 2007. The upgraded frequency will allow for even quicker transactions and a much wider range of information storage.

Electronic toll collection companies so far have been universally adamant about protecting individuals’ information and destroying personal data as soon as it’s not needed, if for no other reason than to protect their system. But who’s to say that some future version of the Patriot Act won’t commandeer the information the next time it’s deemed to be in the national interest.