Is a GPS smartphone app the future of tolling?

Imagine a world without toll cameras and giant metal gantries above the road. No, tolls aren’t going away, but some of your privacy could be.

We use our smartphones for everything. Why not use them to collect tolls?

Washington pilot projects test apps for tolling

The Washington State Transportation Commission completed two pilot projects looking at the viability of GPS-enabled apps to reduce the costs and maximize the revenues of tolling. Reducing equipment like gantries and cameras would save money. Collecting every toll would increase revenue.

Engineering firm CDM Smith conducted the tests for the state, running a pilot program with existing Good to Go! account users on State Route 520 (SR 520) and with internal testers driving State Route 18 (SR 18) from I-90 to Tiger Mountain.

And let me be perfectly clear. Tolling is not coming to SR 18. It was just a good spot to use for this testing.

“The goal here was really just to test toll collection at multiple points, to understand the ability of a smartphone app to be the basis of a flexible toll application,” CDM Senior Strategic Communications Specialist Ara Swanson told the commission this week.

On SR 520, the test used the existing gantry with the app. On Tiger Mountain, a designated spot with no equipment was used via GPS.

Studies suggest technology isn’t ready yet

Smartphone apps are being explored as a potential replacement for normal tolling equipment, but these two pilots and other studies around the world suggest the technology just isn’t there yet.

“This was not a surprise, but we found that we can conclude that smartphone tolling can complement, but not replace today’s roadside technologies for existing toll points,” CDM Smith Vice President Travis Dunn said. “That’s because it’s not a complete solution by itself.”

Smartphone apps have an Achilles heel.

“We can’t rely on customers to reliably carry their smartphone paired to their vehicle for every trip,” Dunn said. “The phone’s going to go in other vehicles from time to time, or the vehicle will go without a phone at all from time to time. So there needs to be other mechanisms that work in conjunction with a smartphone tolling app.”

Don’t expect this as a replacement any time soon, but the commission voted to forward the results to the legislature to see if it wants to conduct more studies.

One of the most interesting discussions on this topic this week was how an app could help enforce the number of people in a car to meet HOV requirements or occupancy declarations.

The problem with tolling systems with flexible requirements for free trips is that it’s hard to enforce.

“A lot of technology has been developed over the years to see about external enforcement or detection, and none of those has really been deployed operationally,” Dunn said. “The accuracy rates aren’t quite high enough. However, some smartphone applications have been developed and tested.”

Under an app being used in Atlanta and Dallas, the number of people in the car is determined by the number of connected phones in it. Of course, I could just have my phone and two burners in the car if I really wanted to cheat.

Nationally, the leakage, or lost toll revenue because of bad plates, bad sensors, plate covers, and cheating, is about 5%.

So what do you think? Would you like to use a GPS app, connected via Bluetooth to your car, to track your car and charge tolls along the way?

Chris Sullivan is a traffic reporter for KIRO Newsradio. Read more of his stories here. Follow KIRO Newsradio traffic on X.

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