Drive-Thru Lanes Taking a Toll

Grabbing a quick lunch at a drive-through window has become even quicker for some drivers in Orange County. Under an experimental program that began last year, motorists who use FasTrak transponders to pay fares on the county’s toll roads have also been able to charge meals at four McDonald’s restaurants.

Proponents say few problems have arisen and they hope one day that motorists will want to pay for all manner of goods and services with the wallet-sized electronic devices, which are typically mounted on dashboards.

That means a cut of the proceeds for the tollway authority and, theoretically, more convenience for its patrons.

Whether consumers can be persuaded to treat the devices as de facto credit cards, however, is an open question. The four McDonald’s in south Orange County in the pilot program have been equipped to read transponders inside cars, but an expansion of the use of transponders to other businesses would mean consumers would have to tote the devices with them.

“It’s just not going to work for people,” predicted Kelly Mulcrone, who uses a transponder to pay about $60 per month in tolls getting to work from her Rancho Santa Margarita home to Cerritos. “It’s just one more thing to have to remember to do. It’s incredibly inconvenient.”

Backers, though, say the McDonald’s test has offered reason to be more optimistic. FasTrak customers spent more than $110,000 per month at the four McDonald’s early this summer, up from $36,000 per month when the experiment began in April 2000.

The restaurants pay operators of Orange County’s toll roads--the Transportation Corridor Agencies--a 25-cent handling fee for each transaction. That totaled $37,823 in the fiscal year that ended in July.

Though that amounts to only a tiny fraction of the toll operators’ overall revenues of about $10 million per month, they see growth opportunities, given the fact that 200,000 FasTrak transponders are in use in the county.

“Our contractor is looking at other potential opportunities but nothing has come in yet,” said Lisa Telles, a spokeswoman for the tollway authority. “We’re not pursuing anything aggressively at the moment, but certainly we’re always looking for ways that would add a value to our customers who have a transponder.”

One hurdle is theft. Earlier this year, thieves used stolen transponders to charge about $4,000 in meals at McDonald’s. Telles compared the thefts to someone stealing your credit card and recommended that transponder users not leave the devices lying around.

But the whole point of the transponders is convenience. They can be left in cars and permit drivers to zip past toll booths without having to stop to fish for cash to pay a toll taker.

Skeptics question how convenient transponders would be if they had to be pulled repeatedly off the dashboard.

A transponder is an electronic mechanism that is triggered by scanners mounted overhead near toll booths. The scanners activate transponders inside cars whizzing past and instantaneously record information on which charge account to bill.

The devices were marketed by the Orange County toll road operators as the most convenient means for drivers to navigate 51 miles of toll roads and the privately run 91 Express Lanes on the often-clogged Riverside Freeway. Reciprocal billing agreements now expand the range of use, allowing drivers to pay tolls on bridges over San Francisco Bay and on the toll stretch of Interstate 15 in San Diego County.

Expanded use of the devices is developing elsewhere. Transportation agencies in New York, New Jersey and Delaware have linked up under a single transponder system for 415 miles of tollways. Under a similar concept, Mobil, Exxon and other gasoline retailers offer consumers key-ring devices that pumps and store registers read to charge fuel and snacks.

The roadside use of the devices could be expanded even more with uniform technology in the transponder industry. When the devices first appeared more than a decade ago, each manufacturer developed its own system, said Fred Veinot, sales and marketing vice president for Sirit Technologies Inc., the Toronto-based manufacturer of transponders used in Orange County.

Over time, he said, three forms of transponders evolved, and none of them will work in the other systems. However, limits on the frequencies that the Federal Communications Commission has allocated to transponders has brought the competitors together. They are trying within the next two years to develop a single set of standards that would establish one unified system, Veinot said.

Without such cooperation, the technology can actually slow traffic, rather than speed it.

The U.S. Border Patrol, for example, issued transponders to allow regular commuters who had received clearances to speed past the sometimes slow checkpoint in San Clemente. But earlier this year the agency discovered that drivers couldn’t carry that transponder and another one for the toll roads at the same time.

The Border Patrol’s “Pre-Authorized Lane” transponders and the FasTrak transponders were set at the same frequency, causing the scanner to misread the information. Some drivers were forced back into the regular traffic lanes at the Border Patrol checkpoint until the transponder conflict was resolved this summer.

With glitches in roadway usage seemingly solvable through technology, boosters of the transponders look forward to the day when use will grow.

But there’s at least one other hurdle on the horizon: The scanners that read the devices cost about $15,000 each, a high price for private companies to justify . . . That’s a lot of hamburgers, French fries and sodas.