Toll Agencies Work Toward ‘Functional Interoperability’

In this April 16 interview with Derek Prall, Assistant Editor of American City & County Magazine, IBTTA Executive Director and CEO Pat Jones traces the U.S. tolling industry’s progress toward national interoperability.

Jones said IBTTA members have been working toward a method of integrating electronic tolling systems that use different technologies and back office rules, “in a way that doesn’t impose an undue hardship and incur extraordinary costs for these legacy systems.”

Just as an ATM or credit card can be used at any financial institution and almost any retail outlet, the goal of interoperability is that “someone from New York, for instance, can drive and use the toll roads in Florida or Texas or Oklahoma.”

It will be a challenge to meet the July 2016 Congressional deadline to fully integrate the all-electronic tolling technologies and business rules in use in different electronic toll collection systems across the U.S., Jones said. “But I think we have a good chance of knitting together the existing systems so that we have something resembling functional interoperability” in the next two years.

For more on interoperability and all-electronic tolling, click here for information on IBTTA’s 21014 Summit on All-Electronic Tolling, Managed Lanes and Interoperability, July 20-22, 2014 in San Diego.