IBTTA Toll Excellence Awards Celebrate Industry as 'Incubator' for Cutting-Edge Solutions

An epic bridge replacement project in Halifax, a toll relief and community equity initiative in Virginia, and a new tri-protocol transponder reader developed for North Carolina were among the winners announced last week by IBTTA.

“The tolling industry has become a worldwide incubator for the implementation of cutting-edge solutions,” said IBTTA Executive Director and CEO Pat Jones.

“Localities throughout the globe continue to harness the power of toll-financed transportation and this year’s Toll Excellence Award winners represent the industry’s most innovative practices promoting greater mobility for drivers, from North Carolina to the United Kingdom,” he added. “Today’s transportation challenges require creative strategies and new technologies to meet the demands of the driving public.”

Innovation in All Directions

This year’s winners include:

• Halifax Harbour Bridges for its Big Lift, a replacement project for the 63-year-old MacDonald Bridge that earned strong community buy-in, and was conducted with minimum traffic disruption;
• The Virginia Department of Transportation for Toll Relief, a first-of-its-kind effort that delivered $458,000 in refunds to users of the Elizabeth River Tunnels who had household incomes below $30,000 per year;
• The North Carolina Turnpike Authority for establishing itself as the first U.S. tolling agency with the ability to read all three transponder protocols being considered for national toll interoperability;
• The E-470 Public Highway Authority outside Denver for a successful, five-year legislative effort to standardize transponder tag design and placement for temporary license plates;
• Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise for the development of The Supplemental Lane Analysis and Monitoring (SLAM) Team. SLAM is composed of a multi-disciplinary staff with experience in maintenance, lane and back office engineering, and finance.  The team defined a set of performance metrics that could be derived from transaction and back office data, then set up means to collect, summarize and monitor the data via reports and dashboards; and
• emovis for its work with the small borough of Halton, in northwest England, to introduce all-electronic tolling as a way to pay for a badly-needed second bridge and address fierce local congestion.

The competition for the coveted IBTTA awards gets tougher every year, said IBTTA Award Committee Chair David Machamer, Assistant Executive Director for Toll and PIKEPASS Operations with the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority.

“Each year, the committee sees a growing number of entries from both the public and private sectors,” he noted. “The process has become quite competitive with entries from across the globe.”

One of the winners will also receive the 2018 President’s Award at IBTTA’s 86th Annual Meeting and Exhibition, October 14-16 in Baltimore. Sign up today so you can be in the room to congratulate the winners!

You can read more about the 2018 Toll Excellence Award winners here.