State and Local Authorities Build Cashless Toll Systems

A pivot to cashless tolling last summer on the 236-mile Kansas Turnpike is already paying dividends for drivers and roadway managers alike.

For drivers, the new system means no longer having to slow down or stop to pay their tolls. Traffic is moving more smoothly now, and that’s made the turnpike safer for travel.

And the benefit to the organization tasked with maintaining this route between Kansas City and the Oklahoma state line? The updated infrastructure required for going cashless has improved operational efficiency while setting up the agency for the future, says Bruce Meisch, director of technology for the Kansas Turnpike Authority.

“Now, we just automatically read transponders. Or, if a customer doesn’t have one, the system captures license-plate information and automatically sends them a bill,” Meisch says. The previous tolling equipment was aging and needed replacing, he adds. “We moved to cashless because it’s what our customers wanted, but it’s also the direction the industry is headed.”

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One doesn’t need to travel far from Kansas to find other tollways reporting similarly successful modernization projects.

“There are a lot of compelling reasons for tollway operators to keep their systems up to date,” says Mark Muriello, vice president of government affairs for the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association. “People want speedy, reliable and accurate transactions, and that’s what they get with all-electronic tolling,” he says.

Cashless systems reduce travel time, help prevent congestion and decrease vehicle emissions, Muriello adds. “And there’s a huge benefit to traffic safety because you no longer have collisions due to people merging lanes.”

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All-electronic systems have clear advantages for tollway agencies as well, says Muriello, who previously ran tolling operations for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. There are the obvious efficiencies that operators gain in terms of the payment collection process, but cashless also opens the door for leveraging tools that make it easier to manage customer information. Cloud technologies have become increasingly attractive to organizations that need to scale up their capacity for data storage and analytics, for example.

“With all of the data coming out of toll systems and from vehicles themselves, the cloud is certainly something we’ve seen infiltrating every aspect of the business,” Muriello says.

IT Modernization Fit for the Task at Hand

The Kansas Turnpike Authority project entailed everything from installing toll gantries and cameras to modernizing back-office technologies to more easily process vehicle data.

The authority turned to optical character recognition software to facilitate billing based on drivers’ license plate information and installed the Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud application platform to host its website and simplify data management. The organization also upgraded its roadway network with a fleet of new Cisco switches.

Today, local drivers can use the agency’s own KTAG transponders, while those just passing through can use compatible transponders from other tolling agencies. Customers can manage their accounts themselves on the DriveKS website or using a mobile app, and all transactions automatically feed into the agency’s IBM servers.

Preparing for the rollout last July took months of planning and testing, Meisch recalls, and there were plenty of what he calls “bumps in the road” along the way. Now, however, with the new toll zones in operation — 36 overall, in addition to six that were already in place — he feels the hard work was well worth the effort.

“I think that we’ve made a lot of progress, and I think most of our customers probably feel the same,” he says. “I’m very pleased with how the system’s turned out now that we have everything up and running.”

Authorities Invest in Cloud for Scale and Access

One tollway organization that’s turned to the cloud is Elizabeth River Crossings, which operates and maintains two major tunnels connecting the cities of Portsmouth and Norfolk, Va.

Like the Kansas Turnpike Authority, ERC uses open road tolling. There are no toll booths, gates or special lanes, and tunnel drivers can pay with their transponders or through the company’s pay-by-plate camera system.

Prior to 2019, says Jim Doerflinger, ERC’s chief of technology, he and his colleagues spent much of their time managing two physical data centers in separate leased facilities.

“It was a lot of aging hardware, a lot of software, a lot of licensing, and they were difficult to maintain,” he says. “We were always worrying about our infrastructure, and it was distracting to our core operation.”

Things came to a head when the facility housing ERC’s primary data center said that that it needed to move. “We took a look at what we had — the 8-year-old servers with dust on the cables — and that’s when we decided to migrate to the cloud,” Doerflinger recalls.

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With regard to technology, tolling can be separated into two basic categories. “There’s everything you have out on the road,” Doerflinger explains, “and then there’s all the magic that happens in the back office.” In ERC’s case, it opted to shift its back-office systems to Amazon Web Services.

“Our servers, our database, code, website — we just found the matching services that Amazon offered and stitched them all together.”

Cloud Overcomes Limitations of On-Premises Processing

For ERC, cloud adoption has allowed it to operate more efficiently while running “extremely lean,” Doerflinger notes. The company has only three employees on its in-house technology team, and yet they’re easily handling transactions associated with close to 100,000 vehicles per day.

About 1,500 miles away, in Austin, Texas, the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority has also looked to the cloud to modernize its tolling operations. In 2022, the agency launched a customized, in-house platform for managing data collected from its cashless roadway systems. Vehicles equipped with electronic tags mounted  on the inside of their windshields have the price of tolls automatically debited from their associated accounts. Alternatively, those without toll tags are recorded by overhead cameras and billed for their passage by mail.

Cory Bluhm, assistant director of IT and toll systems with the CTRMA, says the agency values having flexibility in how it charges in different situations. It may decide, for example, to provide discounts on a certain stretch of road for “frequent flyers,” or it may opt to charge a single fee for vehicles traveling through multiple gantries per day.

In the past, the authority would sometimes run into trouble when its local servers couldn’t handle processing. “You’d have a backlog of 2 million or 20 million transactions, and with limited processors and memory and storage, you could only get through so many in a day,” Bluhm says.

To resolve that problem, the agency architected its new platform to feed into Google Cloud. From there, its chosen rules are applied, and collected transactions are processed accordingly.

“The beauty of the cloud is it gives us the ability to add more resources whenever we need them,” Bluhm says. Just as cashless tolling allows drivers to keep the pedal down en route to their destinations, “all we do is pay for what we use, and that keeps things flowing in a timely fashion.”