PATH’s Hybrid Electronic Toll Collection(FASTag) System (PMIS) is improving the user experience on Bhagan Toll Plaza, says Senior General Manager, Rajesh Jhamnani.

Bhagan toll plaza is situated near village Murthal, in Sonipat District on Delhi – Panipat section of NH-1. The location of toll plaza is strategically very important, as it has to receive and handle the entire traffic coming from both peripheral roads of Delhi i.e. EPE and WPE. So practically, any vehicle coming from south of Delhi, going toward Punjab and further north, has to go through this toll plaza. We see approximately 61,000 vehicles crossing this toll plaza every day.

When we took over the toll plaza on December 21, 2021, the plaza construction was not completed and no Toll Management System was installed. We deployed our own Hybrid ETC System with in three days to start the toll operations. Before this, there was always a huge traffic jam on this plaza and vehicles used to take anywhere between 5-15 minute to cross over.

We recognized the strategic importance of this toll plaza and the potential for traffic with our detailed traffic study and data analysis. We knew, that this toll plaza will receive so much traffic, that any small issue or inefficiency in the system will create havoc in traffic management which could result in huge revenue loss. Also, an efficient ETC (FASTag) reading and processing system was the key to successfully managing this traffic.

Considering this fact, we had deployed our Hybric ETC system (PMIS) in such a way that it does not hamper the currently constructed toll booth and other infrastructure. We fine-tuned our Star Procyon RFID readers in such a way to capture / read maximum possible FASTags in milliseconds. Our PMIS has built in transaction queue management feature to manage multiple tag readings at same time and control the barrier to stay open for all valid FASTag vehicles. Of course, we had to compromise a bit on the cross reading of FASTags, but considering the huge traffic volume, it was a minuscule risk which was unavoidable.

The Reader Accuracy Report for seven days between 1st to 7th Feb-2022, is showing that out of 3,78,978 vehicles, only 1790 vehicle were required to stop and read FASTag with a Hand Held RFID reader, which translates to 99.53% of read rate. This also implies that 99.53% of vehicles crossed the Bhagan toll palza, without stopping at the plaza.

We further fine-tuned our plaza server and transaction processing system to process these transaction and get the confirmation status from acquirer, the IDFC First Bank, in under 60 seconds. The Trx Processing SLA Report shows that about 95% of our ETC transactions were sent to bank, processed and received confirmation status under 60 seconds. Only about 0.2% of the transactions were processed after a delay of 10 minutes.

We have been successfully running this toll plaza on our PMIS system for over 2 months now and this efficient system has certainly made a difference and has significantly improved the experience of locals as well as other road users. This is evident in the feedback we have received from local administration, authority and most of all the road users themselves. The local new channel / media agency, Action India, has covered this impact on the Bhagan toll plaza and has also captured feed back of road users.

We are very pleased with the way the system has performed and profusely thank our entire systems and operations team for managing this very important toll plaza so efficiently. We are also thankful for such positive feedback and acknowledgment of our efforts. This inspires us to continue and further improve in our quest for excellence.