Chapter 15: The 1980s - Toll Collection |
Summary |
The 1980s witnessed the transformation of radio frequency identification from a laboratory curiosity into a practical technology for managing the flow of vehicles on the world's highways. Norway led the way with the first commercial electronic toll collection system in Bergen in 1986, followed by Oslo in 1990. In the United States, the Dallas North Turnpike and the Lincoln Tunnel conducted early experiments in 1989, setting the stage for the E-ZPass system that would later connect toll authorities across multiple states. These systems demonstrated that vehicles could be identified and charged without stopping, reducing congestion and establishing a model for automated payment that would spread to parking, access control, and fleet management. The decade proved that RFID could solve real-world problems at scale, and the lessons learned in toll plazas would inform the technology's expansion into countless other domains. |
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The road leading into Bergen, Norway, in the early 1980s was not unlike thousands of other roads in Europe. It carried commuters, delivery trucks, and families on weekend outings. It was, by most measures, an unremarkable piece of infrastructure. But this road would become the site of a quiet revolution in how the physical world could be mapped, tracked, and charged for the movement of goods and people. |
The problem facing Bergen was straightforward. The city's road network was straining under the weight of increasing traffic. New infrastructure was needed, but the national government could not fund it entirely from general revenues. The solution proposed by the Public Roads Administration was elegant in its simplicity: charge the people who actually used the roads. A toll ring would encircle the city, and drivers crossing into the center would pay a fee. |
This was not a new idea. Toll roads had existed for centuries, and toll booths staffed by human collectors were a familiar sight on bridges, tunnels, and turnpikes. But Bergen's planners had something else in mind. They wanted a system that would not require drivers to stop. They wanted a system that could identify a vehicle, check its account, and deduct the appropriate fee while the car kept moving. They wanted electronic toll collection. |
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What made this possible was a technology that had been developing quietly for decades. Radio frequency identification, or RFID, had its roots in the radar research of the Second World War. The principle was simple: a reader sends out a radio signal, and a tag responds with its identity. But turning this principle into a reliable system that could work on a highway, in rain and snow and fog, with cars moving at speed, required years of engineering refinement. By the mid-1980s, the technology was ready for its first major commercial test. |
In January 1986, the Bergen Toll Ring opened. It was the world's second urban toll ring, following Singapore's pioneering system by eleven years. The Bergen system had eight toll plazas. Some lanes were staffed by human collectors, and others accepted coins. But the most interesting lanes were those marked 'Abonnement' -- subscription lanes. Drivers who had signed up for the service received a small electronic tag that they mounted on their windshield. When their car approached a toll plaza, an antenna by the roadside sent out a microwave signal. The tag, which had no battery of its own, absorbed energy from that signal and used it to transmit its identification number back to the reader. A computer checked that number against a database of active accounts and deducted the toll. |
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The entire transaction took a fraction of a second. The driver did not have to slow down, roll down a window, or fumble for change. The barrier did not rise because there was no barrier. The car simply passed through, and the fee was deducted from an account that the driver had funded in advance. |
This was a modest beginning. In its first years, the Bergen system served a relatively small number of subscribers. But it proved that the technology worked. It proved that drivers would accept it. And it proved something perhaps even more important: that electronic toll collection could reduce congestion at toll plazas by a factor of four or five compared to lanes where drivers had to stop and pay. |
The success in Bergen attracted attention. Other Norwegian cities took notice, and other nations took notice as well. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration had created a model that could be adapted elsewhere. What had happened on the roads of Bergen was not merely a local solution to a local problem. It was a demonstration that RFID could be deployed at commercial scale in a demanding outdoor environment. |
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The path from Bergen to the broader adoption of electronic toll collection ran through Oslo. In February 1990, the Oslo Toll Ring opened with nineteen toll plazas. It was a much larger system than Bergen's, and it was designed from the beginning with electronic fee collection on a large scale. The lessons learned in Bergen were applied and extended. The Oslo system used electronic tags that operated at 856 megahertz, a microwave frequency. The tags were passive, meaning they contained no battery and drew all their power from the signal sent by the reader. The charging lane, from the first antenna to the final signal light, was thirty meters long -- enough distance for the system to read the tag, verify the account, and signal the driver if there was a problem. |
The Oslo system introduced innovations that would become standard in later deployments. If a vehicle passed through a subscription lane without a valid tag, or with an account that had insufficient funds, the system took a video picture of the license plate. If the tag was valid and the account was in order, the video image was immediately discarded. If there was a problem, the image was saved for later processing and enforcement. |
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This approach -- using the electronic tag as the primary identification method, with video as a backup for enforcement -- became a template for electronic toll collection systems around the world. It addressed a fundamental challenge of automated tolling: what do you do when the tag fails, or when a vehicle does not have oneThe answer was to combine the two technologies, RFID for the ordinary transaction and optical character recognition for the exception case. The vast majority of vehicles passed through without any need for human intervention. The small minority that had problems were handled through a separate, automated process. |
By the early 1990s, more than ninety percent of the traffic volume through the Trondheim Toll Ring -- which opened in October 1991 -- was handled electronically. Subscribers received discounts of forty to sixty percent, and their payments were drawn directly from their bank accounts. The fee structure included an upper limit on monthly payments, and passage was free during evenings and weekends. These incentives encouraged adoption and made the system popular with regular commuters. |
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The Norwegian experience demonstrated something crucial about RFID and automated tolling. It was not just about technology. It was about designing a system that people would actually use. The discounts mattered. The convenience mattered. The transparency of the billing mattered. The technology had to work reliably, of course, but the human factors were just as important. A toll system that is faster but unfair, or convenient but opaque, will not succeed. Bergen and Oslo and Trondheim succeeded because they got both the technology and the incentives right. |
Across the Atlantic, American transportation officials were watching these developments with interest. The toll authorities of New York and Pennsylvania, which between them accounted for a substantial portion of the nation's toll revenue, began experimenting with electronic toll tags in the early 1980s. The motivations were similar to those in Norway: reduce congestion at toll plazas, reduce the cost of collecting tolls, and improve the experience for drivers. |
In 1989, the Dallas North Turnpike and the Lincoln Tunnel between New York and New Jersey conducted tests of RFID toll collection. These were not full-scale deployments but rather experiments to see how the technology would perform in American conditions. The tests were successful enough to encourage further development. |
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The real breakthrough in the United States came with the creation of E-ZPass. The program began to take shape in 1990, when regional toll authorities met to discuss their technological future. Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania established an interagency group with an ambitious goal: to develop a system that would allow a driver to travel from, say, Buffalo to Baltimore without ever stopping to pay a toll. |
This was a significant challenge. Each state had its own toll authority, its own procedures, and its own financial systems. Creating a seamless system required not just technical interoperability but also institutional cooperation. The states had to agree on standards for the tags, the readers, and the communication protocols. They had to agree on how revenue would be shared and how violations would be handled. The technology was only part of the puzzle. |
The E-ZPass system that emerged from these negotiations was based on a simple principle. Drivers opened prepaid accounts and received small transponder tags that they mounted on their windshields. When a car with a tag passed through a toll plaza equipped with E-ZPass, the account information was automatically received and the toll was debited. No stopping. No cash. No rolling down the windows. |
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The system was first introduced on the Triborough Bridge in New York City in August 1996, in what was described as the biggest test yet of the new electronic toll system. The Triborough Bridge was the busiest crossing in the city, serving more than 200,000 vehicles a day. The scanners were already in place on several other bridges, including the Verrazano-Narrows, the Throgs Neck, and the Whitestone. The system was also introduced on the Atlantic City Expressway and the Delaware Memorial Bridge. |
The early days were not without problems. Drivers found it difficult to determine which lanes accepted the pass, causing traffic jams when motorists switched lanes at the last minute. Some cars had windshields that prevented the equipment from scanning through them. These were the kinds of practical difficulties that had not been anticipated in the laboratory. But they were solvable problems. The signage was improved, and the system was refined. |
The numbers told the story. E-ZPass lanes could handle 900 vehicles an hour, compared with an average of 400 vehicles an hour for automatic coin machine lanes and 250 vehicles an hour for staffed full-service lanes. The system could process up to three times as many cars as a human toll-booth worker. And customer demand was strong. By the end of the 1990s, more than three million subscribers were using E-ZPass in the six states it served. |
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The E-ZPass system also demonstrated that electronic toll collection could be more than just a convenience for commuters. It was a step toward a world in which the physical movement of vehicles through space could be mapped and recorded in real time. Each toll transaction generated a record: the identity of the vehicle, the location of the toll plaza, and the time of passage. This data could be used for traffic analysis, for billing, and for enforcement. It was, in effect, a rudimentary system for mapping the movement of vehicles through the built environment. |
The 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence of electronic toll collection as a practical technology, but the implications extended far beyond the toll plaza. The systems developed in Norway and the United States demonstrated several principles that would shape the broader adoption of RFID and related technologies. |
The first principle was that passive tags could work reliably in outdoor environments. The tags used in Bergen and Oslo had no batteries. They drew their power from the reader's signal. This made them cheap, durable, and maintenance-free. It also meant that they could be mounted on a windshield and left there for years without any need for servicing. The success of these systems proved that passive RFID was not just a laboratory curiosity but a practical technology for real-world applications. |
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The second principle was that automated identification could dramatically increase throughput. The subscription lanes in Bergen had capacities of 1,600 to 2,000 vehicles per hour, four to five times as high as lanes where people had to stop to pay. This was not a marginal improvement. It was a fundamental change in the economics of toll collection. It meant that a toll plaza could handle far more traffic without expanding its physical footprint. It meant that congestion could be reduced without building more lanes. |
The third principle was that video and RFID could work together. The Norwegian system used video as a backup for enforcement. If a vehicle passed through a subscription lane without a valid tag, a camera captured its license plate. This hybrid approach addressed the fundamental challenge of any automated identification system: what to do when the primary identification method fails. The combination of RFID and optical character recognition proved to be robust and practical. |
The fourth principle was that interoperability mattered. The E-ZPass system was designed so that a driver could travel through multiple states without changing tags or opening separate accounts. This required not just technical standards but also institutional cooperation. The states had to agree on how to share revenue, how to handle violations, and how to maintain the system. The success of E-ZPass demonstrated that this kind of cooperation was possible, even among agencies with different priorities and constituencies. |
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The fifth principle was that privacy concerns had to be addressed. Electronic toll collection created a record of where a vehicle had been and when. This was potentially sensitive information. The Norwegian government's Data Inspectorate was responsible for ensuring that video pictures of license plates were not kept longer than necessary. Video records of nonviolators were kept only for the fraction of a second needed to verify the subscriber's account information. In the United States, concerns were raised about the potential for electronic toll records to be subpoenaed by police or misused in other ways. These concerns did not prevent the adoption of the technology, but they shaped how it was designed and governed. |
The experience of the 1980s in toll collection had an influence that reached far beyond highways. The technology and the operational models that were developed for electronic tolling became templates for other applications. |
One of the most direct extensions was into parking. The same RFID tags that allowed a car to pass through a toll plaza without stopping could be used to open a parking gate and charge the driver's account. This was a natural evolution. The infrastructure was similar: a reader at a controlled access point, a tag in the vehicle, and a backend system for billing. By the 1990s, electronic toll transponders in some states could be used to pay for airport parking fees. |
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Another extension was into fleet management. Commercial fleets -- trucks, delivery vans, service vehicles -- could be equipped with RFID tags that allowed their movements to be tracked and their road usage to be charged. This was particularly attractive for jurisdictions that wanted to move from a fuel tax to a mileage-based system of charging for road use. The technology developed for toll collection provided a foundation for these more sophisticated systems. |
Access control was another area where the lessons of toll collection were applied. Gated communities, corporate campuses, and industrial facilities could use RFID tags to identify vehicles and control access. The same principles applied: a reader at the gate, a tag in the vehicle, and a database that determined who was authorized to enter. The scale was smaller, but the technology was essentially the same. |
The toll collection systems of the 1980s also contributed to the development of standards for RFID. The need for interoperability among different toll authorities drove the creation of standards for tag frequency, communication protocols, and data formats. These standards would later be applied in other domains, from supply chain management to animal identification to library systems. |
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Perhaps most importantly, the 1980s toll collection experience demonstrated that RFID could be integrated into large-scale, mission-critical systems. A toll system cannot afford to fail. If the readers do not work, traffic backs up for miles. If the billing system is unreliable, revenue is lost and disputes multiply. The Norwegian and American systems had to be engineered for high reliability and availability. They had to work in rain, snow, fog, and extreme temperatures. They had to handle the occasional tag that did not read or the account that had insufficient funds. The fact that these systems succeeded -- that they became the preferred way for millions of people to pay tolls -- proved that RFID was ready for serious applications. |
The story of toll collection in the 1980s is, in a sense, the story of how RFID grew up. In the 1960s and 1970s, RFID had been a technology in search of applications. It had been used for animal tracking and for some specialized industrial purposes, but it had not yet found a mass market. The toll collection systems of Bergen, Oslo, Dallas, and the New York metropolitan area gave RFID its first major commercial success. |
This success had a powerful demonstration effect. Once toll authorities saw that the technology worked, other potential users took notice. The managers of supply chains, the operators of warehouses, the administrators of hospitals and libraries -- all of them could look at the toll plaza and see a model for how objects could be identified and tracked automatically. The toll plaza was not just a place where cars paid money. It was a proof of concept for a whole new way of managing the physical world. |
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The technology itself continued to evolve. The tags got smaller and cheaper. The readers got more sensitive and more capable. The software got more sophisticated. The communication protocols got more standardized. But the fundamental principles remained the same: a reader sends a signal, a tag responds, and a computer somewhere makes a decision based on that response. |
By the end of the 1980s, electronic toll collection had become an established practice in Norway and was on the verge of becoming widespread in the United States. The systems were not perfect. They had start-up problems and technical glitches. They raised privacy concerns that had to be addressed. They required institutional cooperation that was sometimes difficult to achieve. But they worked. They reduced congestion. They generated revenue. They made the experience of driving through a toll plaza faster and more convenient. |
And they mapped the movement of millions of vehicles, creating a record of where those vehicles had been and when. This was a new kind of knowledge about the physical world. It was not the knowledge of a map, which shows where things are. It was the knowledge of a tracking system, which shows where things go. The toll tags of the 1980s were the first large-scale deployment of this kind of knowledge. They were the beginning of a silent network that would eventually encompass not just vehicles on highways but packages in supply chains, products on shelves, and assets in every corner of the economy. |
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Detailed Summary |
The 1980s marked the transition of RFID from a laboratory technology to a commercial tool for managing the physical world. The first major application was electronic toll collection, which was pioneered in Norway and soon tested in the United States. These systems demonstrated that passive RFID tags could identify vehicles reliably in outdoor environments, that automated identification could dramatically increase throughput, and that the combination of RFID and video could create a robust enforcement mechanism. |
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The Norwegian Pioneers |
Norway was the first country to deploy electronic toll collection on a significant scale. The Bergen Toll Ring, which opened in January 1986, was the world's second urban toll ring after Singapore. It featured eight toll plazas and offered a subscription system that allowed drivers with electronic tags to pass through dedicated lanes without stopping. The tags were passive and battery-free, drawing power from the reader's signal. Subscribers prepaid for a period of one month, six months, or a year, and their vehicles were video-pictured at random for enforcement purposes. |
The Bergen system was followed by the Oslo Toll Ring in February 1990, which had nineteen toll plazas and was equipped with automatic electronic fee collection on a large scale. The Oslo system introduced several innovations that became standard. It used microwave tags operating at 856 megahertz. It employed video imaging of license plates as a backup for enforcement, with images of nonviolators discarded immediately. It achieved violation rates of about 0.2 percent in the nonstop lanes. The charging lane was thirty meters long, providing sufficient distance for tag reading, account verification, and driver signaling. |
The Trondheim Toll Ring opened in October 1991 with twelve toll stations, only two of which were manned. More than ninety percent of passing volume was handled electronically. Subscribers received discounts of forty to sixty percent and were billed directly from their bank accounts. The fee structure included an upper limit on monthly payments and free passage during evenings and weekends. |
The Norwegian systems demonstrated several key principles. First, passive RFID tags could work reliably in demanding outdoor conditions without batteries or maintenance. Second, automated lanes could handle four to five times the traffic volume of manual lanes. Third, the combination of RFID and video could provide robust enforcement with minimal human intervention. Fourth, driver acceptance depended on incentives such as discounts and convenient billing. Fifth, privacy protections were necessary and could be implemented through data retention policies. |
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The American Experiments |
In the United States, toll authorities in New York and Pennsylvania began experimenting with electronic toll tags in the early 1980s. In 1989, the Dallas North Turnpike and the Lincoln Tunnel between New York and New Jersey tested RFID toll collection. These experiments paved the way for E-ZPass. |
The E-ZPass program began in 1990 when toll authorities from Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania established an interagency group. The goal was to create a system that would allow a driver to travel from Buffalo to Baltimore without stopping to pay a toll. The system was based on prepaid accounts and windshield-mounted transponder tags. It was first introduced on the Triborough Bridge in New York City in August 1996, and by the end of the 1990s it served more than three million subscribers. |
The E-ZPass system demonstrated the importance of interoperability. Creating a seamless system across multiple states required not just technical standards but also institutional cooperation on revenue sharing and violation handling. The system also addressed privacy concerns, with transponder records used only for customer service and subject to subpoena. The early deployment encountered practical problems, including difficulty in determining which lanes accepted the pass and windshields that prevented scanning, but these were resolved through improved signage and technical refinements. |
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Technical Foundations |
The toll collection systems of the 1980s relied on passive RFID tags that operated at microwave frequencies. These tags contained no battery and drew all their power from the reader's signal. This made them cheap, durable, and maintenance-free. The readers used antennas that could be linear or circular, high-gain or low-gain, depending on the application. The tag antenna could be designed for different purposes, with dipole antennas working well in open air and patch antennas designed for metal surfaces. |
The systems also relied on optical character recognition for enforcement. Video cameras captured images of license plates when a vehicle passed through a subscription lane without a valid tag or with insufficient funds. If the tag was valid, the image was immediately discarded. If there was a problem, the image was processed for billing or penalty. This hybrid approach addressed the fundamental challenge of automated identification: what to do when the primary method fails. |
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Beyond the Toll Plaza |
The technology and operational models developed for toll collection had applications far beyond highways. Electronic toll transponders could be used to pay for parking fees. Fleet management systems could use RFID tags to track vehicle movements and charge for road usage. Access control systems for gated communities and corporate campuses used the same principles of reader, tag, and database. The need for interoperability among toll authorities drove the development of RFID standards that would later be applied in other domains. |
Perhaps most importantly, the toll collection systems of the 1980s demonstrated that RFID could be integrated into large-scale, mission-critical systems. A toll system cannot afford to fail. The fact that these systems succeeded -- that they became the preferred way for millions of people to pay tolls -- proved that RFID was ready for serious commercial applications. The toll plaza was not just a place where cars paid money. It was a proof of concept for a new way of managing the physical world, one in which objects could be identified and tracked automatically, and in which the movement of vehicles through space could be mapped and recorded in real time. |
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The Legacy |
The 1980s toll collection systems were the first large-scale deployment of RFID for tracking the movement of objects through the physical world. They created a record of where vehicles had been and when, generating a new kind of knowledge about the built environment. This knowledge was not the static knowledge of a map but the dynamic knowledge of a tracking system. The toll tags of the 1980s were the beginning of a silent network that would eventually encompass packages in supply chains, products on shelves, and assets throughout the economy. The lessons learned in Bergen, Oslo, Dallas, and New York would inform the technology's expansion into countless other domains, from retail to healthcare to manufacturing. The toll plaza was the first place where the physical world became machine-readable at scale, and the implications of that development would reverberate for decades to come. |
cs@easiersoft.com