Evaluating the improvements in traffic operations at a real-life toll plaza with electronic toll collection

This paper summarizes the improvements in traffic operations at the Electronic Toll Collection plazas of the Orlando–Orange County Expressway Authority (OOCEA). Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) was installed on all lanes of ten OOCEA plazas, with one fully dedicated AVI lane at each plaza. The results indicate that the measured throughput of the dedicated AVI lane has increased by 154%. Significant improvements were observed at the dedicated AVI lane including a 194% potential increase in capacity, average savings of 5 seconds in service time per vehicle, a reduction of 1 minute in average queueing delay and 2.5 minutes in maximum queueing delay per vehicle, and average savings of 8.5 vehicle-hours in total queueing delay per peak hour. Also, variability in the inter-vehicle time has been significantly reduced in the dedicated AVI lane. Capacity, inter-vehicle time, and service times of the mixed lanes did not change significantly because of AVI. However, arrivals have shifted to the dedicated AVI lane thus reducing delays at the mixed lanes, and improving traffic operations for the entire toll plaza.