DYNAMIC COLLECTION: ITALIAN APPROACH TO MULTILANE TOLLING

Since June 1998, a full multilane electronic toll collection (ETC) system has been operating along the A11 Florence-Mare motorway in Italy. It has been effective at speeding up traffic flow, as well as collecting revenue, and it is compatible with the Telepass onboard vehicle system widely used on the Italian motorway network. The project's objectives were: (1) ability to handle the rising number of Telepass users in Italy; (2) reduction of maintenance costs at toll points; (3) speeding up dynamic toll collection; (4) minimising environmental impact; (5) developing a basic structure for managing integrated mobility systems, to be applied to any kind of road structure; and (6) introducing virtual toll collection stations for the future. This article describes the system's design features, operating framework, virtual lane, subsystem elements, multilane plant layout, detection and classification subsystems, radio communications, video enforcement, software architecture, and likely future enhancements. The virtual lane principle is based on using antennas with small footprint, designed to be compatible with the monolane version of Telepass; it can be applied even to the case of different onboard units. Currently, all vehicles entering the A11 by the Florence Ovest toll barrier pass through the multilane system.