Celebrating 40 years of globally leading technology The Way to Green Toll Enforcement

Many cities, especially in Europe, are responding to this increasing traffic with UVARs (urban vehicle access regulations) such as congestion charging zones and LEZs (low emission zones). Alongside these measures in cities, tolling on highways is being used since decades to collect money for infrastructure funding but also as an effective method for reducing traffic and congestion. This supports the promotion of low emission vehicles by granting toll discounts to owners of modern trucks and cars having a low emission combustion engine or which are electrically powered.

Due to the AI's analytical capabilities and the camera's detection range, the technology also requires fewer sensors and hardware, making it more cost-effective and easier to implement and maintain. Contributing to this are features such as remote monitoring and sensor configuration options and the modular design, which combined with long component life cycles helps to reduce the need for spare parts and facilitates repairs. All this ensures a faster ROI and thus makes the solution accessible to many road operators as well as to cities and municipalities.

In addition, this "reduction" and improved efficiency leads to significantly lower energy consumption, which, besides financial benefits, reduces CO2 emissions and the environmental footprint.

The evolution of tolling technology

Our current tolling solutions, such as the Tollchecker 5, are the result of step-by-step innovation - in the sense that we have always been driven by the question: How can our technologies overcome the present challenges of tolling?

In the early 2000s, the major challenge was to enable tolling in free flowing traffic, but this required multiple gantries and thus a lot of expensive hardware and large implementation efforts. Back then, VITRONIC was the first company to take a step towards reduced hardware by compromising the technology to only one gantry. However, this was only the first of many new approaches that have repeatedly produced new, advanced systems. Each one built on its predecessor, optimized them or adapted them to the new requirements.

The introduction of the Tollchecker 4 was a breakthrough, as the solution set new standards in terms of efficient and accurate tolling. It was also the basis for the development of today's Tollchecker 5, which has been used initially for implementing an electronic toll collection system in Poland.

40 years VITRONIC - experience for progress

This practical focus and more than 40 years of experience in machine vision systems also means that our experts at VITRONIC take a comprehensive look at its solutions and combines applications from different areas in order to produce the best possible result. For the toll collection system in Poland, for example, 102 patrol vehicles were equipped with enforcement beams to make tolling even more flexible.

As a full-service provider, we had the opportunity to support numerous customers in all aspects of the implementation and optimization of tolling systems. The advantage for customers was that they had a single point of contact for comprehensive services ranging from planning, software and hardware to system integration and testing, technical and commercial operations up to financing support. VITRONIC, on the other hand, gained something else through the intensive customer contact over the years:

That allows us to provide technologies for sustainable, efficient toll enforcement and tolling solutions that are, so to speak, an investment that finances the future!