Deployment and Safety Benefits of Open Road Tolling for Mainline Toll Plazas in Florida

摘要

In the search to improve mobility, increase safety, and provide better service to the public,different toll agencies worldwide have upgraded their system to the Open Road Toll designs.Based on the research analysis conducted by the authors, upgrading from conventional toll lanesto open road tolling (ORT) has demonstrated measured improvements in traffic operations at tollplazas and subsequently conceivable benefits in driver safety from a reduction to potential crashexposure. A previous 2007 analysis of crash data from an ORT plaza in Orlando, Floridaresulted in a 22% drop in total crashes at an ORT plaza and 26% drop in the plaza's area ofinfluence. To further evaluate ORT with electronic toll collection (ETC) benefits, additionalcrash data was collected from six (6) toll plazas recently converted to ORT located on Florida'sTurnpike Enterprise (FTE) system of toll roads. A before and after study analysis was conductedwhere frequency, crash rate, and crash severity were analyzed. The results supported theprevious study showing a significant reduction in the number of crashes. The evaluationanalyzed crash data over three years (2007 to 2009) and there was a decrease in the total numberof crashes, crashes in the non ORT lanes, number of total injuries and total injury crashes. Thecalculated crash rate at all the ORT plazas reviewed displayed as much as a 70% reduction. Toquantify the benefits, average cost of a crash was obtained and when the ORT lanes werecompared to the before study, a savings of one million dollars was shown. The future of ETC isnow moving to all electronic tolling (AET) and if the statistics for crash reductions holds true,the toll road user benefits could be very significant.