Open Road E-ZPass

Seventeen feet above the roadway of the Garden State Parkway, on the southbound side of the Raritan Toll Plaza, instruments on a lattice read your E-ZPass tag and photograph your license plate as you zip past.

Posted October 6, 2008 by Merrell Noden

Instruments on a lattice read you E-ZPass tag and photograph your license plate.

Photo by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey.

The technology in this Open Road Toll system, or ORT, as it’s called, can do what regular E-ZPass lanes can’t—collect tolls from cars traveling at high speeds.

The Raritan ORT plaza, opened in 2005, is thought to be the largest ORT plaza in the world, and it has attracted starry-eyed engineers and transportation bureaucrats from as far away as Spain, France, and China. There are eighteen ORT lanes on the Parkway and ten at three separate locations on the Turnpike.

Antennas mounted on the lattice read the radio frequency identity chip (RFID) in your tag. Patented in 1973, the RFID was developed as a sort of hi-tech branding iron, to keep track of cattle in shipment. It was first applied to traffic in 1993, on the New York Thruway.






Read Me

Antenna detects approaching vehicle. It reads tag and verifies by “writing” info back to the tag, then reading what it wrote. Lane computer sends tag info to Traffic Management Center in Woodbridge.

Photo Finish

High-speed cameras take a picture of every rear license plate. Purple flashes illuminate plates without distracting the driver. If a car has no tag, the photo goes to Violations Center in Texas for manual identification.









Wired

Regular E-ZPass lanes use treadle in roadway to count axles. ORT uses six wire loops embedded in pavement. First signals approach. Next four count axles and gauge amount of metal. Last resets system.









Sick Transit

In the late 1990s, German engineer Erwin Sick developed a laser scanner that reflects off vehicle passing beneath it. The beam measures vehicle height and shape, backing up the other identification systems.







Photos by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey.

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For more stories about: tolls, Garden State Parkway, E-Z Pass