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Shanghai toll roads go electronic

By Cao Li (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-04 07:44

SHANGHAI -- People traveling by road between Shanghai and four eastern provinces will soon be able to pay toll fees electronically.

"By the end of this month, a standard electronic toll collection (ETC) system will be installed at all toll gates in Shanghai and Jiangsu province. The system will identify a registered vehicle and debit the fee to its owner," Zhang Yunjie, a member of the Shanghai urban and rural construction and transportation committee, said on Wednesday at a press conference.

The system will soon be extended to Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Anhui provinces.

It will ease the flow of traffic that at present builds up at manual toll gates.

The 634-km highway in Shanghai with 96 toll gates, handles about 520,000 vehicles a day, including 120,000 to Jiangsu province and 70,000 to Zhejiang province.

Each has a capacity to handle 3,200 vehicles an hour, but during rush hours they must deal with 3,300 vehicles, Zhang said.

It now takes about 20 seconds to check a car through a toll gate. The new system will reduce it to three seconds.

There are more than 2.6 million vehicles in Shanghai and the growth rate is 10 percent a year.

"It is necessary to implement the ETC system as soon as possible as highway traffic is going to get worse in future," Zhang said.

Shanghai began working on plan to develop an ETC system in early 2006.

As an experiment, the ETC system was installed at a few toll gates in the city and have proved a success. Vehicles, wishing to be tolled electronically, need to install an on-board unit (OBU).

From Dec 20, OBUs will be available at about 30 service outlets costing between 300 and 400 yuan.

"We hope that in four years, there will be at least 300,000 vehicles using the system," Zhang said.

Last year, the central government required the Yangtze Delta region to implement a uniform ETC system in an attempt to speed up the process of economically connecting the region.