This synthesis presents information on the design of toll plazas at highway, bridge, tunnel, and other transportation facilities. It will be of interest to toll facility managers and other officials, as well as to consultants concerned with the design, operation, and maintenance of toll facilities. It can also be useful to financial personnel, traffic engineers, planners, and security and enforcement personnel. In addition, it provides information to those concerned with environmental issues such as drainage, runoff, lighting, noise, and air quality. The report focuses on the design factors affecting toll plazas, including traffic, toll collection methods, location and configuration of toll plazas, as well as congestion management, operation and maintenance of the facility, and environmental issues. The synthesis includes discussions of existing standards and practices related to toll facility design, including plaza and roadway geometrics, lane configuration, electronic toll collection, capacity, access, communication, safety and security, signing, pavement markings, and new technology.

This paper presents a methodology for the development of a toll plaza design manual intended for a preliminary estimation of the configuration of an urban barrier toll plaza, such as plazas on toll highway facilities, toll bridges, and toll tunnels. The manual is meant for cases in which conventional methods of toll collections are combined with electronic methods of automatic vehicle identification. During the development of the manual, a new concept - the throughput equivalent volume - was established. This concept is used to convert different volume combinations, of various toll-collection methods, and different vehicle classes at a specific plaza, into a common equivalent volume. The result is homogeneous volume of equivalent vehicles, termed throughput equivalent volume, which enables the summation of various volumes of vehicles bound for each lane category: manual, automated, and dedicated automatic vehicle identification lanes. The method that was developed makes it possible to determine the number of lanes needed for each specific category; this is done by dividing the sum of the throughput equivalent volumes by the throughput capacity of the equivalent lane. A flow chart showing the proposed process and examples of the design charts developed are presented and discussed. Further discussion of sensitivities and complexities of the planning process for a toll plaza is provided. The paper concludes with a list of five principal recommendations for the planning process. Since the results obtained are preliminary and intended to be used in a planning manual, the need is emphasized to fine-tune the plaza configuration for each specific site conditions with a simulation model that considers the randomness of the arrival of vehicles and the throughput variability of each plaza lane.

ABSTRACT: In the U.S. there currently exists a financial crisis for the funding of necessary roadway maintenance and expansion. It has thus become necessary to find other means to fund transportation based projects. One such solution is public-private partnerships (P3s) in which a private investor funds a public transportation project and in turn the government entity allows the private investor to collect tolls to recoup their investment. As this type of partnership becomes a more popular option it will become necessary to develop tools necessary to assist engineers in the planning and design of the toll plazas placed along these new roadways. Simulation software is one of these tools. Simulation software such as CORSIM, Aimsun, and VISSIM, to name a few, are vital tools to the planning process of roadways as these programs allow engineers a means to analyze and visualize their proposed roadway designs under expected traffic conditions. This allows engineers an opportunity to develop the appropriate toll network design before construction even begins. This can greatly save federal, state, and local entities millions of dollars in expenses to correct or alter already started/completed projects. Unfortunately, few of these simulation programs are capable of properly simulating traditional toll plazas. CORSIM, one of the most widely utilized simulation programs in the U.S., does not currently allow for direct simulation of toll plaza facilities. This project resulted in the implementation of direct toll plaza modeling into CORSIM. This was accomplished through the development of new algorithms and modeling features. This document discusses the development, verification, and validation of the new toll plaza features implemented in CORSIM.