Comparison of Vehicle-Discharging Capacity at Toll Booths

Abstract

Traffic congestion at toll plazas on motorways or expressways are commonly experienced by road users. It incurs delays and reduction of level of service particularly at manual cash-toll collection booths. In place of a single service at a toll booth, the concept of a tandem service, which requires several toll collectors simultaneously collecting tolls in cash in front of a toll booth, is currently introduced and publicly discussed in order to increase vehicle-discharging capacity and relieve traffic congestion. This paper presents a vehicle-discharging capacity comparison between the single and the tandem services at toll booths. The proposed methodology is based on traffic engineering and statistics principles. Given the same distribution of service times of toll collectors for both single and tandem services, it is found that the tandem service has a higher vehicle-discharging capacity than the single service does.