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Suncoast Inspiration

Florida's new Suncoast Parkway boasts the state's first Electronic, Express-Lane Toll Installation as well as environmental features, as Emilio Suarez and Tom Knuckey explain.

The 68km stretch of new-alignment highway which opened in 2001 north of the Tampa-St Petersburg metro area of Florida’s west coast is inspiring the whole of the state’s ambitious electronic toll campaign By any standard, it is a motorist’s dream.

Running north-south through mostly rural surroundings known to locals as ‘the Nature Coast’, the Suncoast Parkway (Toll Road 589) occupies a 121m-wide right of way. Easily accommodating a pair of two-lane roadways, its substantial pathway also provides sufficient space for a buffered recreation trail.

This accompanies the entire length and incorporates viewing and interpretative areas. Environmental offsets related to the highway’s construction have also helped to create an 8100ha nature reserve at the southern end.

A theme of environmental sensitivity has underlain all phases of the highway’s design. Examples range from careful stewardship of the surrounding landscape to the coordinated use light-brown cement, brown monotubing elements, black vinyl fencing, and brown, corroded-steel guardrails throughout the highway's minimalist superstructures.

Driving on the Suncoast Parkway is designed to evoke an unusual sense of intimacy with the natural environment. Already winning industry honours and awards, it was built by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), in part to demonstrate that new toll-highways can respond to continuing population growth while acknowledging environmental concerns.

The project also has provided an occasion for the expansion of FDOT’s very successful SunPass electronic fee collection (EFC) programme. In deploying express-lane installations for the first time, it gives motorists the opportunity to drive its entire length, pay three tolls and - all the while - maintain posted speed limits.

Life with Sunpass
The Suncoast Parkway is owned and operated by Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise. Solely responsible for US$524 million in revenue collections on 725km of toll roads throughout the state, Florida’s Turnpike takes its place beside seven regionally-based districts and a headquarters division to form FDOT.

Florida’s Turnpike introduced EFC through its SunPass system in 1999 and announced state-wide implementation in 2001, on the basis of interoperability with other EFC systems in the state. The much heralded express-lane installation opened in October 2002.

Rapid expansion based on consumer appeal is at the heart of Florida’s Turnpike current EFC strategy. A recently announced initiative known as the SunPass Challenge supports efforts to double the number of SunPass-only lanes throughout the state to 200 and increase user rates from 40% to 50% by December 2004.

The Challenge’s long-term target is 75% participation by 2008. To help achieve these goals, Florida’s Turnpike became, in summer 2003, the first US government agency to begin selling transponders at retail outlets (including more than 1,100 Eckerd drug stores and Publix supermarkets).

Florida’s Turnpike has also used a highly-visible marketing campaign featuring billboards, radio advertisements, and even Burma Shave*-style roadside signs. (A series of close-spaced signs communicates an an feet; The dime under your seat; All the coins in your car; Can stay where they are”).

Messages toutLife in the SunPass Lane’ and promote EFC highways as The Less Stressway’ - a phrase first used on the Suncoast Parkway. Combined, these efforts have been highly successful: sales of transponders since summer 2003 have sky rocketed by 50% and beyond; while November 2003 marked the sale of the one millionth transponder.

Customer Satisfaction 
The three express-toll installations already in place have served as a kind of living model for FDOT’s vision of the state’s toll-collection future. We definitely see the SunCoast Parkway as the forerunner,” says Nancy ciements, Florida’s Turnpike director of Planning and Production.

“We believe that, 20 years from now, toll plazas will be obsolete. In our expectation of an open-road tolling future, the opportunity for a motorist to drive on express-lane facilities will be seamless, from one roadway to the next.”

But it is not likely that all open-road toilways in Florida’s future will thread express traffic around conventional toll plazas as the Suncoast Parkway does. Its ample right-ofway allows express-lane customers to separate from traffic on the main thoroughfare and simply bypass plazas where cash tolls are collected.

This has created two main advantages on a highway with a high degree of holiday traffic:

that can be reconfigured to adjust to heavy flows in, either direction.
It has also resulted in a more compact plaza footprint, with associated administrative efficiencies.

Technology in action
The TransCore-built system operates on a ‘smart’ time division multiplexing (TDM) protocol that provides for overlapped radio frequency zones, completing each read/write transaction in approximately 21 milliseconds. The system design relies on an ldris inpavement loop detection system for precise determination of vehicle presence, speed, axle count and other relevant information while it is in the read zone, while meeting a maximum automatic vehicle identification (AVI) speed requirement of 161km/h.

Two particular aspects of the Suncoast Parkway installation demonstrate its emphasis on customer expectations. First, as with all Sunpass facilities, the TransCore manufactured transponders signal successful collection of a toll by sounding an audible tone and flashing an LED light. Second, each installation includes a secondary roadside controller unit, providing potential back-up for revenue collection while eliminating unnecessary lane closures due to routine maintenance or peak-period repairs.

Source: ITS International Jan/Feb 2004

www.itsinternational.com

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