March 28, 2017
Presentation:
Webinar Recording:
Event ID: 3234047
Event Started:
3/28/2017 1:52:52 PM ET
Please stand by for realtime captions.
Good afternoon. My name is Nate McKelvey a conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the best practices in enforcement unmanaged Lane facilities conference call. All lines have been placed on mute. To prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star and the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question press the pound key. Thank you. You may begin your conference.
Hello and good morning or afternoon depending on where you are. Welcome today's webinar best practices in enforcement unmanaged Lane facilities is sponsored by the federal highway demonstrations office operations. I will moderate today's seminar. Before I go further, I will like to let you know those of you calling in that you need to mute your computer speakers or you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well. We have four presentations given I Cris, director of tolling operations, and she will present on the topic of managing enforcement and customer experience. Joe, director of advanced technologies and innovations at Conduent will present on best practices and enforcement unmanaged Lane facilities. Javier Rodriguez from the Florida Department of Transportation will present on Interstate 95 express incident management and enforcement lessons learned. Paul Steinberg chief business Officer at 21% on how a mobile act can provide HOV verification. Sonika from [ indiscernible name ] will moderate the Q&A that of the presentation and Angela at FHWA will provide closing remarks. Today seminar will last 90 minutes with 60 Minutes allocated for the speakers and the final 30 minutes fraud is question-and-answer. If during the presentation you requested you can type it into the question area. Sure to send your question to everyone and indicated questions for. Presenters will be unable to answer questions during the presentation but I will start the question-and-answer session with questions typed into the chat box. If we run out of time and are unable to address all questions, we will intend to get written responses to the questions. Presentations will be available online within the next few weeks along with recording and transcript. I will notify all attendees once these materials are posted online. If you have any technical questions during the presentation, please send them to me in the chat pod. I am now going to turn it over to the first speaker, Cris.
Thank you, Nicole. As a Nicole said, I am the director of the State Road and Tollway Authority tolling division. I have been with this agency about 20 years and working various positions in operations. The authority is also known as SRT a. Today you give you an overview of the state rolled Tollway Authority . talk about how operations are structured and how we think it is the advanced model from the Custer expense. Our newest project which is the I 75 Metro especially, our first minutes Lane project which is the I 85 express lane, and enforcement for both roadways and how they differ, and that will wrap up with how we use specific tools to create a positive experience for the customer without totally compromising our ability to enforce the lanes.
Let's talk about the state roadway and Tollway Authority's. It is a state level independent authority created by the Georgia simply. We have to duties primarily to operate the toll facilities and service the state transportation financing arm. Is governed by a five-member board and the governor chairs the board also. In addition to our tolling responsibilities, the Georgia regional transit Authority was merged with SRTA last year and is anticipated as SRTA will be operated as an express service in the metro Atlanta area effective July 1 of this year. The service currently has 25 commuter bus routes, 30 parking lots located within 12 counties. The agency is led by Christopher Thomason and has approximately 140 employees between both agencies including contract numbers as well.
Let's talk about SRTA tolling operations. It is comprised of customer service , violation processing, the toll operations center which manages the dynamic pricing about the release and a quality insurance training units. I felt this was important to highlight because with this model, operation controls the entire customer experience. What happens on the roadway as we work closely with our tolling engineers regarding reach management to how we handle the customer relationship management and violation processing. We currently have approximately 160,000 accounts with over 500 transponders in circulation. Our current dilution rate is about 5%.
Let's talk about information about our lanes. We currently have to manage tolling facilities with one scheduled to open in the summer of 2018 which is our Northwest corridor and with another project to be completed to expand our I 85 express line for the North that the original project. All of the facilities are registered lanes. This means you must have a transponder to access the lane. Our product that we use in Georgia is called the [ indiscernible word ]. However as you notice on the slide, these roadways have a very unique tolling features which must be managed and enforced differently. Let's take a look at our toll exempt status. For the I 75 S. Metro expense line, over the red buses and emergency vehicles are the only vehicles that are exempt. However on I 85, motorcycles, alternative fuel vehicles, over the red buses, carpoolers with three or more, and emergency vehicles are exempt. When I talk about the I 85 express lane and why it's so different, first let's talk about I 75 Metro especially. The I 75 S. opened January 28 and it is varied and separated. That is one of the main differences between I 85 express lane and our 75 especially. This is 12 miles of newly constructed roadway and it was constructed in the medium of the existing roadway. These lanes are reversible so it allows traffic travel northbound in the morning and southbound in the evening and we also have the ability to adjust the traffic based on special events like the NASCAR races some of Atlanta and also for spring break travelers using our city, our roads as a cut through to get to Florida.
It uses widely used tolling technology with cameras that capture the photos of passing vehicles, OCR technology, there are loops in the pavement to determine vehicle class which also triggers cameras, overhead lasers to determine the shape of the vehicles and AVR readers and microwave sensors together traffic data. Also unique with this project, in the event that we have a wrong way driver because it is reversible, we have alerts within the toll facilities that logs and sends out these alerts and our toll operators within our toll operations center actually get an alert so they are alerted to note they had a wrong way driver. Customers into the roadway at designated ramps and entry points for various ulterior roads. Violations are typical. We take an image of the vehicle when people travel and they do not have a transponder. And that they are sent finds on the registered owners information that we would get from our Department of revenue. Our toll violation amount is set at $25 per occurrence. We have a five dollars fee, $20 fine plus the toll. Since opening this roadway, we have an average of about 4000 troops daily and we do not have any concrete violation information that I would like to share because the roadway is so new. It's about two years to construct. This is truly a joint project between the State Road and Tollway Authority and the Georgia apartment of transportation as they are responsible for reversing the lanes and SRTA is responsible for setting the tools.
Actually our toll operations center is located with the G.traffic center. Let's talk about the I 85 express lanes and how they differ. The I 85 express lane opened in 2011. This is a non-various separated roadway. It is 15.5 miles of roadway. There is one lane in each direction. Because there is no physical barrier, it is mobile striped. Also you will see all the tolling points on the screen. 66 tolling points about half a mile apart. Both roadways are dynamically priced based on traffic. Average toll on this roadway is $2.07 with the average trip being about 25,000 per day.
The reason I 85 is unique is because we constructed this project using a construction reduction demonstration grant. As you can see, it was a conversion from an HOV 2 to an [NULL] T 3. It was the first person demand management strategy project in the state of Georgia. Let's talk about how we actually enforce this road a little bit after we spent some time talking about the technology that is out there. As you can see on the slide, we have overhead tolling system that detects the vehicle entry and exit. We have gantries and confirmation gantries. We also have the ability to detect when people are dodging in and out of the express lane. You will hear me talk about double white line enforcement. That is what we call double white line separation. We can actually use the segments and technology within our back office to determine when a person is entering and exiting at non-entry and exit points. It was originally installed with laser technology but we switched to loops shortly afterwards. As you notice, it is the typical tolling equipment. There is just more of it because of this invisible barrier.
For enforcement, we do double white line enforcement and we also do toll evasion enforcement. There is also an occupancy enforcement on this roadway. Will talk about toll evasion. That is simply when people use the lanes and they do not have a peach pass unregistered users because this is a registered lane. We have double white line enforcement which is configurable in our back office system and is actually managed by the operation deep that goes back to the operation teams having the ability to manage the entire customer experience. The occupancy enforcement is a combination of toll declaration in our back office along with our police enforcement. Currently we use the Georgia Department of Public Safety to enforce our occupancy violations in the back office.
Occupancy enforcement is the most unique part about this roadway. People have the ability to qualify as carpoolers but they self-declared through our back-office system by phone, smart phone app, or online. They can call it, use the app, or actually go online and say they will be an HOV status and it is this done at the account level not the transporter -- Sprint broader level. This transmits the status to automatic license plate recognition system that is on board the police officers computers in their cars. When the officer sits on the shoulders of the roadway which is typically what they do, it is constantly scanning the plates to see if a person is in 3+ non-toll mode. If they get a hit with an audible alert, officers take a look to see if the vehicle has three or people. If not, they make a stop. We update this list every 5 to 10 minutes throughout the day. We do a full list updated daily. It's to confirm we make sure we have all current information on their system.
Here's the customer experience part. Because we'll customers to these declarations, the control is in the customer's hand. Customers can set their toll mode duration for four hours one day weekdays or indefinite. It depends on what they want to talk about it. I think this is why it is a best practice to allow operations to control the entire customer experience. This is just from a SRTA perspective. It is basically managed by the customers. Customers then receive a confirmation once the changes have been made to their occupancy. We can go out on the roadway and use the road. We ask them to wait 15 minutes to ensure the system has been updated. Even if they get on the road when an officer pulls them over and they are supposed to be in toll mode, we get the op sensors and opportunities back-office. We call it the bat phone here. Is operational 5:30 AM to 5:30 PM where they can actually call in the back office and confirm the customers in toll mode.
That is just an extra validation for us. We have not received any calls at the end of 2016 we had received about 21 calls from officers asking us to validate a person's toll mode. We know for sure that the system is working properly. In order to prevent what we call double jeopardy which means they get a citation in the lane and get something from the back office, sometimes officers will call to confirm.
For violation processing, we actually allow customers to get a double white violation penalty from us, we will give them a reduction cut we will reduce the finance charge the fee plus that will. Our primary goal is to always educate the customer and overwhelmingly we have found out that customers do not even realize they have crossed the double white light and it is a highway defense that is not specifically related to our express lanes. It is our hope we prevent them from getting pulled over from this offense on other roadways. Even for our unregistered violators on notices, we allow them to pay the reduced amount if they contact us for 30 days or before the notice is to. If they open an account, we will waive the fine and fees and allow the customer to just pay tolls only because our goal is to always make them customer and make the experience for the customer even though they are a violator, to make it a positive experience. In closing, we also allow customers different payment options. We have pay and go product where customer can go into a retail location, they can go into CVS and Walmart and pick up a pay and go-cart which is the retail product and pay for the violations. Also online, if one of our customers get a violation they have not entered their credit card information or edit a vehicle and they get an alert so they can remedy the violations before they go in. Customers can pay 24 hours a day by using our interactive voice response. We offer a payment plan with violations with 10 or transactions. These make it easier for the customer to make payments. We understand that enforcement is necessary but we also value the customer experience. With that, I will turn it back over to Nicole.
Thank you, Cris. We are now going to move on to Joe of Conduent for a next presentation.
Thank you. A brief word of introduction on Conduent, we are a spinoff from Xerox as of January 3 of this year. You may have encountered us in the past as a Xerox and we are now Conduent. I do our advanced technology and innovation work for Conduent. I will talk a little bit about our experience we have developed a tool that can be used as an enforcement tool as well as a test and data gathering tool. I will talk about some of our experiences with the recent pilot.
I think we all recognize the challenges, managed lanes, we create HOV and HRT lanes to try to manage congestion due to land management. Most systems rely people honestly declaring their qualify to be in a lane. We as a switchable tag or declare that you're qualified. In some cases, use a smart phone up to do that as well. Part of our experience is going to be that enforcement by humans on the right side is challenging. Is so fast, there is such an immense number of vehicles and violators that it is hard to stand.
We have developed a system called Conduent vehicle passenger detection system. We have a pilot in Canada, Halifax bridges, in France, we tested in Northern Virginia where I live as well as we have done three trials in California with a series of lanes. I will talk a little bit about the data we gathered as part of this experience and the debt I can share based on some of the pilots we have done and talk to the challenges of enforcement on a managed Lane.
The primary focus of our pilot, there are a series of questions we try to answer. Most of the time, people are trying to sort out what level of automated accuracy can be achieved by a system like this. What is the violation rate on the roadway, do I really have a problem? And how well can human enforcement perform? As it turns out, we are able to achieve about eight we are able to achieve about 895% automated accuracy. Pretty good and I'll talk about some techniques to improve that. On all the pilots we have run the best, lowest violation rate was 11% but it goes up to 20%. The violation rate has a direct impact on the performance of the roadway. So once the general-purpose lanes congested and people start moving over into the express lanes and especially if you have dynamic pricing in place, it is very tempting to just set your tag to HOV if you are in a switchable tag environment and that is where your system starts to breakdown and you see highway speeds that are 15 to 20 miles per hour and not 45 to 50 where you want to be. How well can human enforcement perform?
It is very challenging on high-volume roadways and you have the issue of officers pulling people over on the roadway. It is the safety and congestion concern. We wanted to figure out a way to try to address that. I will talk a little bit more deeply so our system is predicated on a couple of things. There are two terms, machine learning and computer vision. Our system uses computer vision and that it is trying to mimic what we know as humans. Some people might call it artificial intelligence. We train the system so it knows what an occupied seat looks like and what an unoccupied seat looks like. By trading it through thousands and thousands of images, it learns when a car is occupied and when it is not occupied. In this particular roadside, you have, this is a laser detector. We will detect cars in this spot right here. The laser detector will detect the car. That will cause this site a limiter flash and as front illuminator to flash. This is down the road a ways and cars and right to left. That will then cause the cameras to flash. The cameras will capture an image based on the flash. It is a fairly subdued flash. It is in an invisible part of the band near infrared. The longer version of this, I have a video I play where we show you what the flesh looks like but it is fairly subdued.
The images we produce as a result look like this. I have redacted the images for privacy. We get high-quality images that our system then does and automated scoring on. And we do it because we can figure out where the window is, with a region of interest is for both the front and side windows. We are able to make a determination of the vehicle. With this particular car, it looks like somebody is in the front seat and although depending upon how big your monitor is, there is actually someone in the backseat. So this car would qualify for HOV 2 on this facility.
This talk about the challenge of enforcement for humans. We conducted a three-day trial with Caltrans and looked at how well could we identify our system could identify single occupant vehicles versus worksite observers equipped with digital tools, clickers and tablets. Essentially while our system was at about 95% accuracy rate roadside observers were at about a 35% accuracy rate. It was pretty consistent both evening and afternoon. When you look at the total stats, it really comes clear with a challenge is. For instance, we ran this for three days between 6 AM and 9 AM and then 3 PM and 6 PM. We had a total of 18 hours. We saw about 12,000 vehicles. This was one where we had a violation rate after adjustment for low emission vehicles. And Caltrans got they allow you to be in LA with an L.E.D. We saw about 14 violations of 18 our great. When it comes down to is that you're looking at in one lane, we are looking at 671 vehicles per hour or a car every five seconds.
You have 78 violators per hour based on the statistics we gathered. There are two challenges here. It is really tedious to be a human and try to catch car going by every five seconds. Also you cannot put enough enforcement of the roadside to catch 70 people per hour. The congestion that would result from enforcement activity with be an issue. We talk about three concepts of operation. This is the system going to our vehicle occupancy detection system. One way that we see it and I see this less and less occurring. But we can alert an officer downstream if there is a violator coming up. We could send it to an officer in the back office and they could then issue a ticket. This all depends upon your jurisdiction and what is permitted. Some facilities look at adjusting the toll. This seems to be the lowest list possible. If someone declares themselves HOV and they are in fact not, we can send them a letter saying that you're taking HOV mode and realize these things happen. So in the future, please adjust your tag and then we would adjust the account. That is kind of concept of operations where we are seeing more people adopting. It is again because there is only so much enforcement you can do. Realistically, an officer can probably make three or four starts in our if they are very efficient. But again, it creates worksite congestion. Essentially, the flow for the system is all vehicles are captured and stored and we had up with an HOV score as well as the images and we have whatever the input from the toll collection system is so whether it is a switchable tag, so you can see that you have a switchable tech that sets it and you can also set it with a smartphone application.
For those that are identified as candidate violators, people have their tags said HOV went they are not, we will send those to manual image review and when it comes out, we typically are in the vicinity of 99% or more. This is the concept of operations that many toys are pursuing. A quick word on economics, there are gross numbers here. In a typical tolling, we have toll lanes with 10,000 vehicles per day and some with SI 17,000 pretty plain.
If you have a violation rate of 2% which is not unreasonable because the violation rate in our studies range from 11% to 28%, that yields 10,000 violations or 1000 violations per day which is about 250 violations per year so you can see the system will pay for itself very quickly. As far as lessons learned, the good news is that most people are qualified to be there. 72% to 89% of the people who are in the lanes should be in the lanes. Most of the people we found were good performers. Conversely, that means that somewhere around 11% to 28% are not, should not be in the lane, and that is what is causing some of the congestion issues.
Another key point is while revenue may be important, the challenge was safety and congestion is that stops by enforcement officers and when we have talked to officers, they obviously have things they are trying to do as well, force moving violations and expired plates and stuff. So it can be a bit of a challenge for them. Even the presence of enforcement can cause congestion. We've all seen it.
Equity in the roadside, I know that as we have talked to people about the system, if a select group of people are that you can basically get away with cheating, others may join them. Improving flow, when we see more people jumping in the lanes that are not qualified, that reduces our service levels from A and B to E and F. On other thing we debrided a lot of products cut 95% accuracy is not good enough for automated enforcement. We recognize that. You cannot have that. When we augment that with manual review on identified violators, again, we can reduce the error rates greatly.
Lastly, we recognize from her Caltrans study is that the naked eye, it is just sitting for three hours and watching cars go by, trying to determine the number of occupants, under a variety of conditions, the things we do, we bring our own elimination. Very hard to do enforcement with the naked humanized at night without proper elimination . system has its own elimination and captures images. So we are currently looking to deploy with people and we are very far along in conversations and I am optimistic that the next time we talk about this, one of our clients will present this to you. That is all I have. Nicole cut thank you, everyone, for listening.
Thank you conference call. Will now move on to Javier Rodriguez of the Florida Department of Transportation. Javier?
Thank you and good afternoon. Today I have a brief presentation on our I-95 corridor in Southeast Florida. We will talk about incident management and enforcement because the two are tied together. I will talk about lessons learned along the way. A quick project overview, we are building in the state of Florida in the southeast portion. We have a project that is being built in different phases. The first phase was completed back in December 2008. A year after that we completed the second phase called phase 1B in the southbound direction. Late last year, we completed phase II of the project pretty much which expanded the expressway from what segments to multi-segments into Broward County. The conversion to an HRT, we used to have one HOV lane and we want to express lanes in each direction. By doing so, we had to reduce the inside shoulder on this quarter therefore making it hard for it force personnel to actually be able to use that insight shoulder to use for it force purposes. The problem with congestion price tolling and will also introduce bus rabbit transit and ramp meters also incorporated into the project.
Incident management is tied to do enforcement. In order for us to be able to mitigate some of the issues with the reduced shoulder with, we added additional elements to the efforts. We have dedicated TMC express Lane operators. Their job is to make sure those lanes are open to traffic and flowing. We have contracts on this quarter and added additional units. We added a flatbed wrecker that gives us opportunity to toe two vehicles anytime. We also added heavy-duty wrecker to tollway disabled vehicles in the facility. We added an incident response vehicle and operators. We also are adding additional law enforcement personnel. We have hired by contract with highway patrol which are paid for additional to pursue assistance with enforcement and with incident management. We have developed quick clearance procedures with the different agencies in this region.
On the enforcement side, the toll enforcement is done electronically. Through the Highway Patrol here in the state of Florida cut we have different types of enforcement on through the facility pick toll violations, if we see the facility similar site five concept in Georgia where there is no physical barrier. Their plastic delineators. What if we see vehicles bypassing the tolls got also enforced by the officers. Regular speeding as well. HOV and [ indiscernible -- heavy accent ] so only carpoolers may use it free of charge. Improperly change got this has been a big issue in our area and it is called Lane diving what folks are entering in or out of the facility at will.
Question the double white line. Also hard closures, we realize that sometimes in order for us to be efficient with her closures in addition to posting on the dynamic message signs, [ indiscernible -- heavy accent ] we will still see vehicles coming in and out of the facility. At that point, enforcement is able to properly cite this violators. Again if HP is also a key partner in the enforcement management. They are able to assist with express and locally incident management. Let's talk about some lessons learned in the operations. Do not underestimate the need to have full with shoulders to be able to do a lot of the incident management enforcement activities. The separation from express lanes from local lanes is also important. You can see here in the top picture, we have these markers to separate the express from the local lanes. We are looking at different options and I will get into that in a couple of slides in here.
Provide the means to physically close the facility got we have a project in construction out to deploy gates to some of the entrances of the expressly. One thing we learned throughout the process is the fact that you need to make quick decisions on the operations side and have the required seven resources to make the adjustments.
The incident management, again dedicated resources, what have a specially trained and equipped resources ready to respond to the incident. Since we do have those reduced shoulder, anytime you have any disabled vehicles or minor rashes got you could potentially closing facility. Don't underestimate the importance of having the multiagency partnerships worked out early in the process. We do have a contract with FHP but we are paid for additional troopers to assist us to keep the lanes open to traffic. Carry approximately 70,000 vehicles in this facility in those four lanes. It is about 35,000 in each direction of daily traffic volume. The traffic incident management teams, we conduct a lot of different tabletop exercises and what if scenarios to make sure we are on the same page, ongoing coordination meetings with different agencies. Through quick clearance procedures we identified the need to have dedicated station areas in the corridor to dispatch resources quickly. You can see in the bottom picture one of those areas that we actually outfitted with the corridor. You will see FHP tubers along with the resources staged for quick to limit. -- Quick deployment.
On closing the facility realized especially in afternoon peak period in the northbound direction that whenever we had closure the facility, there would be a fender bender or disabled vehicle, we had close the facility. We actually are posting a closed message on the dynamic message signs. We realized that a lot of the motorists are simply ignoring the message and will continue driving to the facility. That creates a series of problems not just for the responders trying to expedite the clearance but also post incidents clearance where we actually from a closed scenario to backup and tolling, the facility was plugged up with traffic and it was difficult to come out and recover from the closed mode. We implemented the hard closures we actually physically close the entrance facility. You can see that where we have Road Ranger vehicles along with FHP vehicles to physically close entrance to the facility and take care of the incident and FHP can enforce vehicles entering the facility.
We realize we have these aberrant signs on for the DMS and that is what is being used to state the closed message and again it is not really enforceable so we had a project that we updated all of our total amount signs from Amber to be able to post white text on black background. This will give the FHP officers more places to enforce and stand up in court and defend citations that are given to motorists entering the facility when it is closed. As I mentioned before, we are deploying some gate as a pilot in a few entrances to assist. Takes a lot of resources to actually physically close the facility.
You can see here a picture of the postemployment we had again in the top image. The closed message in Amber and the bottom we have the message that allows us to be with the regulatory signs. Ongoing efforts, we are counseling DMS is providing public information to the driver so we remind them of the fact that crossing the white lines and the plastic barriers, you could have a citation. Also when we were replacing our DMS is from ever colored DMS, we also updated the violation information and added this panel. It includes the violation for the toll violation here as well.
Again on the markers, we went through a process of replacing all of our especially markers in the first phase of the project. We used to have these type of markers shown here. Now we have the new markers. We went also from spaced out in the beginning at 20 foot spacings and here you see 10 for spacing and now we have enough I spacing. That is having a big difference in the amount of traffic that is choosing to cross from one link to another. Obviously is a maintenance got you want to make sure that you are replacing the delineators especially you want to avoid large gaps.
Also the same time, we have a construction project that we began earlier this year where we are building what we call the stopping sites along the inside median the facility. It gives room do not just emergency vehicles but also enforcement personnel to be able to pull vehicles overdue enforcement activities. With that, I'll turn it back over to Nicole.
Thank you, Javier. Now for a final presentation from Paul of Carma.
Thank you very much. Today I will talk to you a little bit about what we have learned being in the business of measuring occupancy and how it can be applied to what you guys talk so much about enforcement and taking a different approach. I will start with telling you a little about other services and products that we offer that you may better know, Carma cars his car sharing like a Zipcar that is offered in the San Francisco Bay area. Trying to zoom, we introduce a fleet of vehicles specifically for carpooling. Members come to a park and ride and often a car and one participant drives the vehicle this is not a. No one is getting paid. The same cars become [ muffled audio ]. Carma carpool is where people have smartphone at and they can match up in real-time to carpool to and from work. We do all of our project team in with the government so you will see us in all of our projects partnered even with the fence at the state or local -- local transportation level to ensure that the data we are capturing is utilized in planning purposes. As I mentioned, all projects and partnerships, and we leverage our technology and apply it in different ways whether it be tolling that was on track today or convincing people to carpooling , car sharing, et cetera. What does this technology do? One is carpool. It is simple and say forward. It is not a sexy thing to do but we help people match up to get to work. This is not Uber, this is not a pay driver pick people share the cost of a right. We have government project in the U.S. that encourage that. The same technology is also used for providing parking discounts.
Parking access is based upon occupancy picketing on a people in a vehicle any drive into a San Francisco parking garage, this an example of a pilot we provide an incentive for discount of reduced rate for capitalist as we have occupancy data we can share that with the ticket machines a concatenated price in real-time or other applications this would be a parking section for carpoolers to get on it. Since we occupancy, we can open and close the gate. What we'll talk about today is how can these in the world of managed lanes are tolling to my discounts and/or measure occupancy for many uses such as enforcement they are talking about but I will talk about convincing you process somewhat similar to information already know for being in a tolling business for many years. We're trying to address it in a different way. Enforcement started off with police officers, my father worked for the tolling authority clicking quarters, it wasn't safe, someone profitable we try to catch them. Now we have more advanced methods we put a jabber system or lay system to notify the police officer of the needles in a study to investigate. As you have heard, it is very difficult. Is time-consuming. Since my father-in-law has been in law-enforcement for 35 years, it is the last thing and actually suffers wants to do is sit on the road and give a $200 ticket putting her life in danger. Is certainly not safe,. As you know, it also slows down the network. As he park the police officer the side of the road, everyone slams on the brakes regardless of their heading to get out. We now allow PeopleSoft there. You know the challenges. Sometimes we set it to three and we drive because carpool in the next day we forgets to switch back. These are just accidents. It is not a perfect science. Moving into camera kinds of systems, we do projects around the globe and invasion of privacy is a big deal in certain disabilities where peering into a vehicle to see how many people is just not allowed. All these kinds of enforcement ways of attacking this problem generally to us seem that they are all focused around serving penalties to trade two different cheaters. The challenges as we know are many.
One is infrastructure. You have to bill law-enforcement or build a separate ramp or camera relay systems and signal systems to the officer. The coverage of enforcement is very low. The view ability of a camera, the places he can place a law enforcement officer on the road and the amount and kind that are actually out there, we're talking about less percentage of coverage in the network when you tried to visual enforcement methods, accuracy, safety, and the performances, the biggest issue because any method visual to the drivers is going to cause, it causes one of them on the brakes cut that's all it takes to create a bottleneck. Finally errors cost involved that when you consider the amount of money that you are actually spending for every ticket that you are issuing got someone is cheating at over two dollars and it is costing you literally tens of thousands of dollars to take it to court and prove that using enforcement methods.
I guess with all this said in the privacy concerns, my question back is enforcement really the right approach? I would offer an alternative. The alternative is instead of enforcement, allow people to verify themselves in a completely optimum way. We have taken our technology provided a simple mobile app that is highly prevalent, pervasive, and 85% of Americans own a smart phone or smart watch and for those people who do not have the proper device, we issue a beacon. Allow people to opt in if they want to provide their occupancy. Some people do not want to and they are willing to pay a higher rate or not have access. But what have access to a speeding or discounted toll, let them often. It allows you to get completely out of the privacy concerns because no one is being looked at unless they ask for it. It is 24 x 7 x 365 coverage. It does not get impacted by weather conditions. There is absolutely zero infrastructure to at the existing network or a new network. It is virtual whole coverage of your network because we can give you at any time stamp the occupancy that people are declaring. It can be at entry. It can be at an inch on your network and highly. What can that allow you to do as a road operator? A lot of things. Once you know occupancy, certainly you can give discounts like we have been hearing today.
If someone is in a higher convincing vehicle at rush hour, your policies maybe to provide some kind of financial incentive, especially for conversion projects it can also be for providing access. It tells them their compliance and or optionally provide audible alerts to sell them if they are in violation and have whatever policy want to set, time for them to get out of that lane. Performance measures is a new topic. If you know speed and occupancy, at every inch of your entire network, you can now embellish your performance measure reports that the Federal Highway Administration has recently announced. Finally what we would like to see long-term, once you have all this data, you can might it and analyze data, it can help you do things like claiming where road ramps or on ramps should be because we cannot only provide you with what is the occupancy the network but if they are opting in, we can tell you where they are coming from, where they are accessing the network, with a destinations archive and finally can provide an incentive to carpool for increased capacity once the network gets full and you can no longer build increased capacity. You have got to look at increasing the number of passenger throughput as opposed to the number of vehicles but. Thank you very much.
Thank you couple. With that's got those were over presentations. Will now move to the question and answer session. Sonika?
Thank you, Nicole. I want to go ahead and take all the speakers for today for taking the time for sharing their insights experiences and lessons learned with regard to enforcement and verification on managing facilities. We do have a post attendance today -- a robust attendance today at a seminar and a pretty active chat box during the presentation. For the next meeting time that we have on the webinar, we will take all these questions. I want to mention that if you would like to speak out your question or engage in discussion with presenters, you are now able to do that by pressing star 1 and places of the queue to speak out your question. We will be taking the phone questions after we are done with the ones that are coming in on chat in the order received. We will launch into the questions we haven't checked. First question was from Brent Baker. Cris , you noted that SRTA express lanes have about 5% violations. Can you elaborate on the definition of violation and how you measure the actual violation right?
Sure. We have a continuous process improvement division that actually does all of our data. So we calculate this by looking at the vehicles that use outline without a transmitter or are unregistered violators and Company this number by looking at the total unregistered violators rate and divided by our total debate. This is done on a monthly basis.
I want to mention again if you have a follow-up question or want to ask during the meeting, you can always request to be put on the queue for the phone questions. The next question we have for Chris is from Daniel. Continuing on from Brent question, please advise on the rate of compliance and payment violations.
Let me clear that. The violation rate is for I 85 express lanes because we just opened I 75. Did not have any data that they wanted to share the violation rate as of yet. As far as Daniel's question, our collection rates for our two nonregistered violations again. And we are at about 37% at the last rate that we actually collect and we do use a combination of collection agencies and our agents so we try to collect in-house for the first 60 days and then it goes to an outside collection agency. The latest rate we have is about 37% of that we do collect.
Loretta wanted to know does the user need to have been read entry toll station and the exit toll station to be billed for that segment or is the customer build on entry?
We take an entry and an exit. That is how we look at it and that we use to the building to Catholic the entire trip. I hope that there's an up and if not, you can ask a follow-up question we can talk off-line designer.
On your screen right now, you probably see the slide has all the presenter email addresses. If you want to follow up outside of the webinar, please feel free to do so. Daniel once you know do you have any drivers declared three people but they only have two people aboard?
This was prevalent when we first opened the roadway, the identifies especially. However, it is not as common now and that is why we get less calls from officers to actually verify when the customers are in dispute. I think education has helped reduce is about whether it was through our program or the CRC head of the calls because the HOV tool conversion, we need to understand why there was some confusion by customers once reopened. We felt they could still use the roadway and understand that we had actually went to a 23 ditch -- went to a HRT 3. It was prevalent but now we do not have as many people who are confused.
Brent Baker as a follow-up question. He says if there any additional information available for occupants violations?
I do not have it on hand but if he reaches out to me, I would be more than happy to have our continuous improvement center get that information from him, for him.
Harvey, is Van automated vehicle occupancy detection system being considered?
No.
Peter top what type of equipment is used to detect runway driving? Is a microwave or some other technology? If microwave, dual beams? Can you tell us who the vendor is?
We are using our roadside toll transaction system to detect when a vehicle is entering in the opposite direction of where we are totally the toll position. Our tolling integrator is for 75 S. and for the northwest corner it is 3M. We're simply using our tolling equipment.
[ participant name ] when snow is there difference in the violation between I 75 barrier separation and I 85 double line separation.
We do not have enough data on 75 S. yet to release violation rate information. I am almost positive there will be a difference because of the barrier separation. I would say contact me about six month and will probably have some concrete data that we can release. We're just not willing to release any information right now.
Makes sense. Seth Fisher, lessons learned regarding messaging to the customer regarding the different exemption status for different facilities, like a motorcyclist can write free here been out there.
I would say our lessons learned for us is that because we told customers that there is a difference on the roadway that they were clearly understanding but they did not so we partnered with the Georgia Department of Transportation and our Department of driver services actually issues licenses to motorcycle drivers, they do targeted outreach campaigns and let them know that even though these are two managed facilities, you can write free online but not on the other one. I will say that it has not been an easy task for our external affairs department. But their efforts have been aggressive we are hoping we got the message out to our customers. It has been very difficult. Even other statuses that are exempt on 85 but not exempt on 75, there has been a lot of outreach and education that we had to do but we will not of the full results of that until we have time with 75 S. actually in operation.
Peter has a follow-up question. Is law-enforcement from normal scheduling or after our patrols that are paid to cover these lanes?
Our primary focus for officers is to covers during the peak hours which is Monday through Friday 6 AM to 10 PM and in the afternoon from 2 PM to 7 PM, they are paid to the State Road and Tollway Authority said they are paid to cover our I 85 express lanes although they patrol the rest of the hours, it is really definitely during the peak hours is where we need to support the most.
I think at this point these are all questions for Cris. You are welcome to get back in queue if you want to see out your question on the phone. We will take the phone questions at the end of all the chat based questions. I want to thank Cris and want to move to questions for Joe. The first question we have is from Lance Hall. Does violation rates take into account clean-air vehicles with decals or are these legal single occupancy vehicles included in the violation right? I think Joe responded to that seen that it did factor in decals vehicles. Not sure if you want to elaborate on that.
That is correct. We did, there was an adjustment downward for low emission vehicles. That is correct, Sonika.
Okay. Roberta asked how well did the camera images work when vehicles have heavily tinted windows?
We are not that affected by tend because we are in the near infrared part of the bad. So if you looked at the images I showed, we actually are able to get through the tent with the infrared light, the flash that we put up. Obviously there are going to be, so it is not a perfect system and it is only, it is just much faster than humans on the site. So people are hanging laundry in the back window or dry-cleaning and they both of you, it is sometimes possible to make a determination. So it is still line of sight. But we do fairly well with tinted windows because of the flash. We did a lot of engineering around the flash.
Chris wants to know assuming the 95% accuracy for HOV 2, what is the detection rate to verify HOV 3?
I thought the question will come up and I looked at the Caltrans data and it was about 1% lower. It went down to the high 94% range. But what occurred of course enabling and part of this is always affected by the composition of the late , since it is an HOV 2 link on the violation rate for the 3 was 85%. Almost everybody had just two people in their cars. But our accuracy rate was at about 94%, 94.5%.
Was stuff a ones to know can the system differentiate between an actual human and a dummy?
It is actually, the way we train the system is we teach it what a human looks like. We score tens of thousands of images. If there is a perfectly made dummy, we might mistake it for a human. But people would be spending a lot of time to be making a perfect dummy. We have tested it against a lot of situations we have seen other website. I know there somebody caught in Seattle with a psyches guy. We can catch that. There are various techniques we see people using it would catch them. I would say that perfect dummy might deceive us but highly unlikely.
Austin once you know what a 5% foster cattery comprised of?
It breaks down into two buckets. Is just the standard 2 x 2 matrix. There is the false positive and false negative's. So a false negative is where I declare you are not a violator when you fact are one and the false-positive is when I declare you to be a violator when you're not. We can tune our systems that I can force the errors into one bucket or another what many agencies want to do is if I put them in the false positive buckets, if I tune it so I had very few errors, I can make it so the false positives are larger and then I will get all the violators and I will sort out the ones that are errors. So essentially that's what the 5% is. In the Caltrans trial, it's about evenly split. But I can confidence level to put it in either bucket.
Just a clarification, the 5% is equal between false positive and false negative?
That is correct.
Just wanted to make sure because he talked about eliminating the false --
The manual image review. So the automated accuracy is at 95% with the 5% error split between false positive and false negative about evenly. I have two tools at my disposal to manage that. I can manage the confidence so I can put the false-positive company more false positives and false negatives. Furthermore commonly augment with minimal imagery review, and correct those errors. We would not send out a notice on automated basis.
Okay. Chris, another question which was really to accuracy, Heather been any courts that imposed a fine based on the 95% accuracy?
No, we do not have it in production anywhere yet. And again, our view is that once you have images and you have the score, well you have is to very clear images that would be an evidence package that you could say look, there is clearly no. So we do think the courts would allow it. But it hasn't been tested it. -- Tested yet.
The next question comes from [ participant name ], I am not sure I clearly understand it, what is the average violation between 11% to 20%? -- 28%?
Violation rates vary by facility. So we have run eight pilots and so different violation rates depending upon the facility. The worst or highest violation was 28% at the lowest was around 11%.
Brian once you know what with the lighting conditions for 95% accuracy and does that include day late, on, desk, and night?
We test under all conditions. We are around the clock. It works 24/7 and that is partly the reason we bring our own elimination because we are able to control the level of fighting. So yes, it is in all conditions. The particular study of citing, that test was run 6 AM to 9 AM and 3 PM to 6 PM. We have gotten similar results around the clock. It does not really vary with liked.
Okay. David once you know how does that system work with dual toll lanes.
If you have a second tolling just like any camera system or human trying to look into the car in the secondly, you will experience seclusion. But when we have done testing and we did one to evaluate the specific question, even intense traffic with Carson side-by-side we were able to make a decision on a 95% of the cars the second lane. We could make it accurate decision we actually mount the side fire camera for the second lane a little bit higher and at enable. But there will be times where it is occluded by a truck. Is the nature of all kind of camera-based systems I divided tolling, license plates get occluded. But like I said, we were able to make decisions about 95% of the vehicles and secondly. -- Vehicles in the second lane.
The next question was by Steve, what is the CHP's position on utilizing the Conduent system. Is not used in California. Only the pilot projects, CHP will examine the process and any potential issues.
That has been our expenses well and CHP and other state Highway Patrol have other enforcement activities they have to engage in because when we have talked to them, we have people speeding and people driving without plates and people with bumpers and their cars. So there's a lot of activity out there for enforcement officers to focus on. We're just trying to relieve them of this key responsibility.
The next question by James, have you assessed the eye safety hazard risk of Conduent's technology?
We have. I said this is in response, I know this recent study that says whatever infrared lasers are harmful to humans, the technique I am using or we were using is not an infrared laser. We are using a mirror infrared flash. So we are in the visible part of the spectrum and it is a flash so it is incoherent light as opposed to coherent light which is a laser and I do not want to get too scientific here but the fact is that a laser is a focus light. I have seen people seeking to use the laser technique to get to periods the Carpenter system does not do that. It is a flash that is fairly benign.
We have the energy received from my from the flash will not damage the eye.
Okay. [ participant name ] had a question about the safety of the the imitator -- the illuminator flash. [ participant name ] what's to know what is the accuracy for [ muffled audio ] which you already answered. Jeffrey wants to know where the cameras visible to drivers and do you think the presence of the cameras influences the violation rates you presented?
I do nothing it. I cannot know for sure. You basically saw the pictures of camera set up which was at the side of the road. I do not know, there were no warnings that there was enforcement area ahead because we didn't take any enforcement action. We simply wanted to assess with the violation rate was. I do not think people caught on to what was going on. We did not do follow-up with people of the website to determine if they knew what was.
That is all the questions we have in the chat box for Joe. Just want to thank Joe at this time. We will move on to questions for Javier. The first question I have from [ participant name ] is [ muffled audio ]
The two systems are not sent back active coordination between the two districts . find [ indiscernible -- heavy accent ] this is to coordinate for resource sharing but [ indiscernible -- heavy accent ]
Jeffrey wants to know if when you said that when some people , you have an 87% violation rates, what number is Representative that it is that they what gets divided by what?
Once we post closed, from the vehicles, 87% continue going to the facility after seeing the closed message. That's what we are doing is using the detectors upstream and downstream of the entrance, physical entrance, to measure the violations we are seeing.
I think that is all the questions we have for you on chat. Questions are still coming in so if anything comes up, we can address it later or people are welcome to reach out to the presenters directly if you have questions that you are not able to get to in this webinar. Moving on to questions for Paul, first question by Loretta, how would you enforce the occupancy that the user is declaring? The user use the app to declare but how is this confirmed on actual roadway?
So once a user, it is an installer forget kind of app and once the installer register, they can forget about it and never have to watch it again. Is up to the local toll line or MPO agency to decide where and how they went to interact with that data so we have open [ indiscernible word ] or secured meeting we have to give a token to the agency that they can query at any time stamp so when a car drives into the gantry, recognize they can ask what is occupancy. When you register, you can register with allegedly number or toll take and that is the information were passing up through the [ indiscernible word ]. Here's the Toltec our license adheres the verified occupancy. We do not disclose to the tolling authority information like names. That can be pulsed by the tolling agency or we can pour the data into a whole back-office reconciliation later.
Pierce wants to know what your thoughts on the ability of the beacons to undermine the honesty of the concept?
Being in a carpal mobility space for many years, we cannot relent people's honesty. Sometimes people do it on purpose and or it could be an accident. The app is designed you can install it forget it. Their obvious examples what you might someone trying to fraud the system like using multiple beacons or multiple devices and algorithms are designed to identify that. So the first time you try to cheat, if that is the intent, maybe use two cell phones or use multiple beacons in the space, you may get by the first try the pattern of behavior, this is data mining, after the pattern, we will notice the fraud patterns and the information for potential fraud, we prepare that data provided to the agency. Is up to them to decide from a policy level adoption want to take. I would argue if someone violates the toll one-time, [ muffled audio ] and violet once, is it really worth it? If you see some try to scan the system every day, maybe it is worth it with the cleats. Our job is not to decide if it is a violation, our job is to provide data that can be provided in detail to the agency in support of hypotheses of ways people are trying to get around the policies that are set by that agency and it is up to them to decide what taken was actions are not.
-- Take enforcement actions or not.
Jeffrey wants to know, you said that your verification technology is not subjected to weather conditions. What if the weather event such as a severe thunderstorm affects cell phone reception?
The system is designed to work off like. Could be a thunderstorm or people turning off the data plan. Everything is captured off-line and uploaded to the cloud whenever there is continuity. Violations may not be in real-time but as soon as the data connections reconnected, when they reconnect the phone, we will then have the data at that point. If you have a data connection while they are driving into the gantry, they will have real-time compasses all part of the reconciliation process the back-office agency to allow for lack time incidences. The data is being captured even though the funds may or may not be connected to the Internet or cellular network.
[ participant name ] as a question. The car troubles with free cell phones but only one occupant on point, does the Carma system recognizing?
Again, that is one of many examples that were identified through the pilot in San Francisco of ways that people may intentionally or unintentionally try to represent false occupancy. Whether you are carrying portable devices, you iPads and cell phones maybe a working personal cell phone, even if you download the app with multiple accounts, these devices or caring multiple beacons, these are things amongst many others that are very common examples of patterns of behavior that we know are potential fraudulent and we identify again very first attempt to do that. It may not be a red flag. But we will eventually enter the data mining that maybe occurs Steve Dare to our weekend we will identify patterns and present that information to the local authority.
Adam wants to know what the next steps for testing the Carma technology .
The technology there are some pilots you can research, a paper last year the pilot that leverages technology and there are some pilots launching this year that are successful or are intended to expand throughout particular states but we are not willing to discuss is at this time but by [ indiscernible word ] in the summer, we should have more public information for you.
Thank you for your responses. At this point, that is all the questions that can be typed in the chat box to you. We do have some follow-up questions that have been coming in for the earlier presenters. [ participant name ] once you know from Cris, [ muffled audio ] does this mean a car trailer can easily?
Short answer is no. It is [ indiscernible word ]'s position that they should not be allowed to safety issues because of the shoulder with along the enclosure of the barrier. This was not a question when he opened the express lanes because we were targeting the large container trucks. As we have opened the 75 S. lanes, we know people will be using that lane to travel especially [ muffled audio ] people will more likely use those lanes as a road from travel. They may be traveling with some trailers. There is a lot of work that has to be done because signage has to go up and other decisions have to be made. From GDOT's, they would not like trailers to be on the roadway. That is for safety concerns.
Jeffrey has an interesting question about have you been involved with enforcement of the lanes that estate HOV lanes such as on Atlanta's data connector?
No.
The last question at this point that we have a chat is for Joe. Is from Sharon. Did any of the pilots address the issue of notifying users that cameras were in effect on the facility?
They did that. We did not put of signage that indicated that there were cameras and use. It was for HIV detection. -- HOV detection.
Okay. That is all the questions we received a check. I want to check with operator at this point if we have anybody who is ready to ask a question on the phone line?
As a reminder, please press star than the number one to ask a question.
[ pause ]
There are currently no questions the queue.
Okay. It seems that there are no questions on the phone at this point. We do have five minutes left which is just enough for closing remarks. Just wanted to remind you if you have questions, feel free to reach out to presenters directly. In the interest of time, we did not much into the congestion pricing program. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions regarding that. We also have on the call, Angela Jacobs, who is the pricing manager at the office of operations. I would like to call upon her at this point to offer any closing remarks.
Thank you. I appreciate it. You can hear me?
Yes.
Okay. I do appreciate all of our presenters and thank you for everyone for attending and for the great questions. I think something, one of the lessons learned clearly from the presentation that Chris made is the emphasis on the customer experience. I loved how she floated that throughout her presentation and just that reminder that making sure that the customer, whether they are right or wrong, feels like there concerns have been addressed, I think that is something important in the managed lanes and priced managed lanes community and making sure that there is support from the public. I think we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. Presentation by Conduent that Joe made is pretty interesting. We see there are a lot of challenges still out there especially in terms of using switchable transponders and continuing to try to address some of the issues we have with violators and declarations. Once again, that was interesting to me that we have this option that Joe was sharing and share the approach of the shared declaration and being able to work with the police to confirm that.
Javier's presentation was great and I found the information on the hard closures and the solutions taken to address violations and taking steps to update the message signs to make them viable so they can actually find violators and hold them accountable, it is amazing the steps the staff is using to address and try to make performance on these different facilities, make sure that it is reliable for the users. Finally, it is always great to come up with and have an opportunity for some like Paula to participate and talk about using innovations and technology like smartphones as a strategy to enforce occupancy.
That one of the other really important things, lessons learned from Paul's presentation is the value of partnerships. He stressed that throughout his presentation. And I am looking forward to seeing what happens in terms of partnerships throughout all of our managed Lane projects and facilities. And I hope that just having an opportunity to get is very varied presentation in terms of approaches for enforcement has been useful to everybody who participated today. With that, I will close it and turn it back over to Sonika .
Thank you, Angela. With that, we are at the end of the webinar. There will be cut this webinar recording will be posted on the FHWA website and will also be circulated to all the attendees and registrants who may not have been able to sign up for webinars so they could hear this at their convenience. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with me. You have my email address on the webinar. I want to thank you all for taking the time to join this webinar. And I look forward to working with you in the future. Thank you. Goodbye.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.
