The National Freeway Bureau yesterday revealed the key performance indicators (KPI) it will use to evaluate the operation of the electronic toll collection system, adding that Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co (FETC) could face fines of NT$500,000 per day if any errors are found in the transactions.
The bureau decided to launch a three-month evaluation of the toll collection system after a series of transaction errors occurred in the accounts for the eTags, the toll tags drivers must use to access the toll collection system.
Bureau Deputy Director-General Wu Mu-fu (吳木富) said the bureau has formed a special committee for the evaluation, which consists of seven members. Their expertise ranges from transportation management and legal affairs to information management, he said.
Currently, FETC’s contract with the government states that the fee collection success rate must reach 99.8 percent and the toll charge accuracy must exceed 99 percent.
Wu said the evaluation this time only targets the problem of drivers sometimes being charged for the same trip twice, and the standards used in the evaluation will be stricter than the thresholds stipulated in the contract.
Wu said members of the committee had stipulated that the occurrence of the stated error must not exceed 0.1 percent on a single toll collection gantry.
“Aside from looking at the percentage of error at one gantry, the committee members will randomly select six or seven gantries along the freeways per day during the evaluation. All the data collected through the sampled gantries must not have this type of error at a rate of more than 0.02 percent. Should the FETC fail to meet any of these standards, the penalty is NT$500,000 per day,” he said.
National Chiao Tung University associate professor and inspection committee spokesperson Huang Tai-sheng (黃台生) said that the committee can only produce valid results if the daily sample contains at least 20,000 transactions. Huang added that there are 319 gantries along the freeways, and on average, each gantry would be inspected twice between Saturday and April 30.
“At each gantry, we will sample the cars driven through it within 10 minutes and calculate the percentage of errors by adding up the gantries we sample that day,” Huang said. “So suppose 3,000 cars pass through one gantry per day, the company would fail the evaluation if three such errors were recorded. If we sample seven gantries, which could produce 21,000 transactions, then there must not be more than four errors recorded.”
The inspection committee will determine if FETC has passed or failed the evaluation.
While inspecting the operations at the bureau yesterday, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) reminded the agency to “be on high alert” during the Lunar New Year holiday, as this is the first major holiday after the nation launched its “pay as you go” policy and the toll-free hours have been extended from seven to 10 hours.
The bureau said that homebound traffic had started to appear at 3pm yesterday. Cars were moving slowly on the southbound sections between Jubei (竹北) and Hsinchu and between Wangtien (王田) and Changhua on National Sun Yat Sen Freeway and between Hsinchu and Chiedong interchanges on National Formosa Freeway.
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