TECHNOLOGY : Companies Disagree on Best Equipment for Automated Tolls
Who makes the smartest technology for the so-called smart tollways of the future?
That is a topic of debate at the IVHS Society of America conference this week in Newport Beach. The Washington-based society, whose moniker stands for Intelligent Vehicle and Highway System, hopes to fight traffic congestion by using modern technology to make cars and highways more efficient. The group includes local governments, transportation companies, auto makers and technology firms.
One popular application of modern technology for highways is automated toll collection. At John Wayne Airport, for instance, cabbies pay their tolls automatically, simply by driving past a device akin to a supermarket bar-code scanner that reads an electronic tag on the car and tallies toll amounts, which are paid later.
But a dispute over the communications standard for automated toll collection has developed between Hughes Aircraft Co.’s Ground Systems Group in Fullerton and Dallas-based Amtech Inc.
Amtech officials are pushing a technology that they say has been tested in numerous systems across the country. They say that California transportation officials should adopt the Amtech radio communications standard as soon as possible so that new toll systems can be installed.
But Philip Davy, a Hughes manager, contends that the Amtech standard is technologically unreliable. He says that the Amtech-supported standard may not be able to read toll tags accurately on every car that whizzes by a tollbooth at full speed.
He also says that Hughes’ technology could be used in a wider group of applications, including identification of stolen vehicles.
Amtech uses a “backscatter modulation” or one-way communication system in which energy from a roadside scanner is reflected off a car’s tag and returned to the scanner.
Hughes uses an active transmitter, a two-way communication system that allows a car’s electronic toll tag to both send and receive communications. The Hughes system could be used for more sophisticated communications than toll collection, such as transmission of records from a car to a scanner.
Rand Brown, an Amtech vice president, said his company’s standard has won scattered endorsements, including support from the American Assn. of Railroads, which could use the technology for automated ticket collection.
The state’s office of administrative law is expected to rule on the Amtech standard in the next 30 days. At stake: multimillion-dollar contracts for automating California’s tollways and toll bridges.
