Illinois toll system gets upgrade
The state has converted its toll plazas from the barrier style to open-road tolling in which vehicles equipped with transponders cruise through the toll plaza at highway speeds.
Unisys has upgraded the e-commerce system it hosts for the Illinois Tollway.
Unisys developed and hosts the I-PASS Online Account Management System at its Eagan, Minn., data center. The application, which Unisys has supported for several years, won an Outsourcing Excellence Award last month under a program sponsored by the consulting firm Everest Group and Forbes magazine.
Last year, the Illinois Tollway finished converting its toll plazas from the barrier style to open-road tolling in which vehicles equipped with transponders cruise through the toll plaza at highway speeds. The tollway reports that 2.8 million transponders are in use, and 77 percent of tolls are paid electronically every day.
The I-PASS system lets customers review and update their prepaid toll accounts online. It also allows drivers to buy and activate I-PASS transponders.
In recent months, Unisys has brought new features into production, including a missed-tolls capability that lets motorists who accidentally drive through a plaza’s I-PASS lane without a transponder pay the toll via the Web, said Richard Concaildi, an account manager at Unisys.
A payment received within a week of the missed tool is not processed as a violation, according to the tollway’s Web site.
Unisys has also provided a violation-enforcement system that identifies vehicles that consistently use open-road toll lanes without paying, Concaildi said. The system’s Web interface has also been revamped to provide users with direct links to the system’s most popular modules, he added.
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