South America: First Passive RFID Toll Road System

Argentina will be getting the first South American RFID toll collection system. The system is based on passive RFID and launched by IPICO Inc. and Argentina's Dyna Group. So far, the trial reports that the 2500 daily users have had 100% success. Plans are to expand the system to handle 15,000 users by the end of 2008. The use of passive RFID tags results in lower-cost transponder tokens, which will help considerably since the area is considered a developing region. (Passive RFID tags do not have a power source and are usually used for short ranges.)

Oddly, the press release points out that the system can identify vehicles at speeds up 240 km/h. Even my 1997 Subaru GT, which had an incredibly smooth ride, could only handle 174 km/h. At 175, it started to shake, rattle and roll. Correct me if I'm wrong, but how many developing nations would need to identify drivers at such high speeds? Even the Autobahn in Germany started posting speed limits after the Berlin Wall fell, because older East German cars were getting in the way of high-powered West Germany cars.

This is not the first radio frequency toll system in the Western Hemisphere. Highway 407 ETR (Electronic Toll Road), which spans at least 80 kilometres east-west through sections North of Toronto, Canada, and outlying regions, has been in place since about 1997. (Neither the term RFID nor the words "radio frequency" are mentioned in the description of the transponders at the official website, but insiders indicate that radio frequency technology is used.)

This project was considered by some to be a provincial government fiasco. The Government of Ontario, I believe, sold the highway off, at a steal, to a consortium that included a Spanish firm - although Bell Canada was part owner the last I heard. According to my sources, the Spanish firm started sending collection agencies after 407 users for amounts as small as Cdn$3.00, which were overdue no more than a month. A late payment of even that small an amount resulted in a $30 fine. A class-action suit was launched against the c onsortium, although I'm not sure what prevailed.

The 407 ETR apparently started off as a project that included Bell Canada and was to have license-plate recognitiion technology as well as RFID transponders. In the end, with the recognition technology not functioning on dirty license plates and during snowstorms, Bell Canada hired college students to view videos of car plates and manually record license numbers. Many people complained of the ridiculously high toll fees (I know someone who paid Cdn$600/m for weekday use, both ways, of a 60 kilometre section.) Other people received toll bills when their car had never been anywhere near the highway.

While the Canadian project was well-intentioned, many citizens are said to be unhappy with how the whole system works. Some other automotive-related RFID trials are the smart license plates in Japan and the e-Plate Project in the UK. In North America, RFID has been used in millions of vehicles, total, for nearly twenty years.