Emerging Trends for Commercial Fleets

Good afternoon and welcome to tolling in 2021 emerging trends for commercial fleets, a fleet owner magazine webinar. I’m Mindy long and it’s my pleasure to be your host for this event. Before we begin, I’d like to explain how you can participate in today’s presentation. If you have any technical difficulties, please put your question in the questions window, and our technical experts will assist you. We recommend disabling any pop up blocking software or extensions in your browser, as these can cause issues with the webinar player. Additionally, we welcome your questions during today’s event. You can send your questions at any time by simply typing them into the question window on the side of your screen and hit the submit button. We will answer as many as possible during the Q and A session following today’s presentation. If we can’t get to your question today, we will follow up directly after the webinar. Today’s presentation is made possible by best pass the comprehensive payment platform provider and leader in toll management solutions for commercial fleets of all shapes and sizes. Understanding new trends in tolling in 2021 and how tolling will evolve into the future is critical for most commercial fleets, especially those with large regional or national footprints. By learning more about these trends and evaluating the cost and benefits of using specific facilities, fleets can optimize operations, creating an overall positive impact on the bottom line. Joining us today is John Andrews, President and Chief Strategy Officer for best pass John has more than 20 years of experience in technology implementation, senior management and development and deployment of scalable services and solutions. Now I will turn the time over to John. John, welcome, awesome.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone. Hope everyone’s doing well in this strange covid time. Today, I’m going to hit a pretty broad selection of topics around tolling. In the coming year and years, we’ll do a general background on kind of the tolling infrastructure, the US and what’s what, and numbers and whatnot, cashless tolling and the trend that covid has kind of escalated here in the Northeast. We’ll talk about mileage based fees and then some of the challenges to regional and national fleet operators, along with, of course, our toll management solution, which tends to address a lot of these, of these issues. So tolling in the US, these numbers are debatable. Some would look at them is bigger or smaller, but roughly, there are 50 tolling authorities in the continental US, 520 different operators, and 342 tolled facilities under under those umbrellas, 29 states have toll roads, and there are about 6000 miles of toll roads in the US currently, and that number is only going to go up, Given the infrastructure funding challenges that are seen across the US. Each tolling authority operates independently, which is part of the challenges that we have in our toll system. And they require multiple transponders in order to operate across the network. And then they’re all converting the cashless tolling because in order to squeeze more revenue from the system, removing the people in the toll booths that collect the money and handle the various tickets is a way to generate more revenue and save on expenses. So there is definitely a trend there and then, obviously, as we’ll talk about with covid, that contactless exchange on a toll road is also driving a lot of the changes towards hands free, tolling or cashless. All electronic on this map here shows the current toll facilities, the major toll facilities in the US. They run the gamut. Most of the toll facilities in the US are about 80% of the miles toll miles in the US exist east of the Mississippi. That’s the mainly easy pass country down through Florida. One of the challenges the toll industry has is three major protocols, and without getting into the nitty gritty details of that, each of the technology infrastructure that the toll authorities use use a different protocol, radio frequency ID that they that they use, and that introduces challenges when you try to take a vehicle, particularly a commercial vehicle, between these regions, and that’s where a toll management solution comes into play, to stitch these together. But as you can see from this map, it’s it’s colorful and changing. Region to region introduces challenges for a commercial fleet, cashless tolling and all electronic tolling. 80 it’s, it’s basically, if, I mean, I’m a child of the 80s, and I grew up in New York, and I used to remember getting on the New York State through Ray, and you get a ticket getting on, and you drive down the Thruway and hand the ticket in with some cash, and you paid it. So. Over time, you could do that with a transponder, not have to talk to anybody or deal with handling money, and then with covid. Recently, the three way has successfully transitioned all to electronic tolling, and there are no toll booths or people to talk to. That is the transition. A lot of the states that are introducing tolling, more recently, like Rhode Island, are immediately starting off without toll booths. They’re putting gantries up on roads and tolling vehicles. And a lot of times, your drivers may not know they’re on a toll road, which introduces a unique set of challenges for a business trying to use the interstate system for their business. There are 6767 I’m sorry, 76% of the roads in the US are cashless, and that number is only going to go up. I have conversations all the time. The few remaining booths, I think you’re going to see in Ohio and Indiana will all start to come down or present some form of electronic solution in the coming years. So why does the ET work, and why? How does it work, and why? If the picture I have on the screen here shows a traditional toll booth with the with the lines of folks at rush hour or whatnot, lining up to go through it. Picture on the right is the new version, all electronic version of tolling. It’s a gantry. It looks like it’s scanning just about everything under the sun as you go under it. And that’s highway speed tolling. They’re measuring axles in the lanes. And I’ll actually jump to the next slide. Here they are counting axles or the weight of the vehicle. They are reading your transponder, if you have one, and then they are also taking pictures of your license plate as backup to that transponder or the primary form of billing, which again, is where some of the challenges come into play for a for a commercial fleet, but license plate issues are quite the challenge. Tolling trends, there are two challenges coming together, the need to fund the new infrastructure, maintain existing infrastructure and diminishing gas tax revenues. We can see that in Rhode Island, where they have bridges that were in rough state of repair, and they had a couple of ways to go, and they decided to go putting gantries up, toll gantries up, and charging, in this particular case, trucks for the wear and tear in the bridges so they could repair them. It was relatively inexpensive to do it’s accurate. You’re only taxing those people using the facilities. And as we know, as vehicles become more and more efficient, the gas tax revenues are declining. Pre covid, there was already a trend to cashless tolling to save overhead costs for the tolling authorities. But with covid It’s only accelerated that obviously lower facility operating costs the realities of a toll booth, congestion and its health and safety the poor booth operators are dealing with exhaust weather sometimes upset patrons. Then obviously, if vehicles brakes go that accidents, all of that is all caused by a toll booth that creates those opportunities. So with those coming down, there is a health and safety benefit to bringing those down. So there’s a lot of pressure. I’ll use the word pressure to remove the toll booths and become more efficient in the collection of tolling. And again, I have to point out that is now easily it’s not as expensive as it was to be able to toll a road all electronically. You don’t have the staff overhead. You don’t have the infrastructure of a toll booth that requires bathrooms and lighting and all the safety and whatnot. All of that expense evaporates and just becomes a simple gantry over there, over the main line of the road or entry exit point. The impact of covid, that’s pretty obvious. The Thruway accelerated. It’s all electronic efforts. Obviously, if you have people sitting at home because of covid issues, you have nobody to collect hole in the booth. So they accelerated their their move to all electronic during covid, and they’ve actually completed that for the most part. So you’ll see that elsewhere, anywhere else that has toll booth, they’re all having the same conversations, given the health factors that covid is introducing, and the exchange of money and all the things that that toll booth brings through personal contact that is all being dealt with and there and again, pushing the need for electronic tolling and taking the booth down. Some of the realities of cashless tolling. They’re both positive and negative. It’s faster and safer travel. Obviously, you’re not slowing down to go through a booth. You don’t have backups to handle the cash being exchanged. It’s more expensive without managed toll accounts. So one thing you have to remember, if you’re if you’re going to ride a all electronic system, and you do not have a transponder, you don’t have a vehicle properly registered, that it’s typically more expensive for a tolling authority. Bill a vehicle that is not registered on an account, a local account or an away account, they typically mail you a bill in the mail, either that’s a violation, although those days are going away, but you’ll get a bill by mail, Bill 30 days later, which then you have to figure out, how do you fit that into your business, and what was the vehicle doing at that time? And who should get that toll bill back? And it’s typically more expensive, between 1050 30% more expensive. And I can get into the reasons why full by mail, by plate, is more expensive. There is more overhead, and computers, as good as they are, can’t necessarily read license plates accurately, so some percentage of the license plates have to fall down to a human being reading of looking at a picture and then improperly identifying the vehicle, plus a DMV lookup is not free. So again, that is all going into why plate based all electronic tolling is more expensive by transponder. It’s usually the least expensive. It is the least expensive way to go improper vehicle registration is a big growing issue with all electronic tolling Well, tolling agencies are interoperable by transponder. They aren’t necessarily interoperable by plate. And what happens if your vehicle is not does not have a transponder that operates on the facility, and the vehicle is not properly registered for that facility, you will incur a toll by plate or a violation, and that creates, obviously, expense for a commercial fleet, and more expense for the tolling authority, which is again driving up that cost. The trend new toll and existing infrastructure, as I pointed out, with Rhode Island, there are a lot of other states that have to deal with a crumbling infrastructure. This is a way to do that all electronic tolling is a relatively inexpensive way to charge the folks for you that are using that facility
delayed notice of 30 to 60 days coming back to the to if you don’t have a transponder. That 30 to 60 day delay is typically for a fleet, a challenge. You’re getting bills in the mail. You have to then take a license plate, match it back to the vehicle, figure out where it gets built. It just creates an awful lot of expense after the toll expense, and this is where a toll management solution, again, can come in to make sure your vehicles are properly registered and get the toll expense properly back to the business. Increased ad hoc monthly billing that’s again related to that if you’re receiving paper bills ad hoc from different facilities because vehicles or trailers or whatnot are not properly registered, that just again creates back office expense, which typically cannot be easily billed back to your customers as a fleet operator, miles based users fees, there is a lot of emerging conversation about other ways to raise revenue for infrastructure repairs, funding, maintenance, new infrastructure, and miles based user fees is part of that conversation, and where that interacts with tolling is that if you if a state interacts some level of miles based user fees, and there’s also trollers and toll roads in that state, you have to make sure that you’re not double taxing the vehicle. You don’t want to charge the toll and a miles based fee. So that’s where the two systems are going to interact at some level, I am not aware of active conversations between the toll world and these mile based programs that are going on. But companies like best pass and free pass that do live in this space, on the commercial side, are active. We are active as best pass. We’re active in the conversations on both M buff and rock fees on the Eastern Seaboard, where we are participating the I 95 corridor pilot to make sure that we understand we’re not supporting it. We’re not for or against it, but we do know, as a toll management solution, that if there is an M buff or rock system put in place in any state, it needs to coexist with a tolling system for a commercial fleet. So that is something we’re very much involved in and again, that’s why I want to point out here that the miles base and toll systems for a fleet that runs Interstate is going to be a major factor in any of the services that provide these types of capability. So case for Toll management. So what is toll management? It’s a combination of technology, payment and vehicle management that come together to take a lot of back office cost. A lot of times, people think that best pass and other companies are solely about maximizing toll discounts, and while that is a factor in what we do, mainly what best pass does from a toll management solution is to remove the back office cost and what we call delayed billing. So as these paper bills are coming in Downstream for trucking company, it just creates headaches and challenges from an accounting and re billing point of view. With a toll management solution like like the best pass provides, we make sure your vehicles are properly registered, we make sure the right. Your devices are in your vehicles based on your travel patterns. And we can get into into that it but critically, because I said, as I said earlier, the license plates are not all registered. Or, I’m sorry, tolling authorities do not all are not all interoperable on license plates. It’s up to the trucking company, if you manage your own toll solution to properly register your vehicles. That’s not easy to know with, again, with 26 to 30 independent major toll operators, and to register your vehicles and to make sure trailers, which is key for rear facing cameras, your trailers, are part of the equation here, unlike a passenger vehicle, to make sure all of those vehicles are properly registered to in flow through a data stream, as opposed to a paper stream. That is a key component of what a toll management solution should provide a base level component, some of the challenges again, 128 operators, 342, facilities, 80 to five to 90% of the vehicle volume is local. That means the tolling authorities, their primary mission is local vehicles. They are worried about the commuters. They’re worried about the people that use their facilities all the time. Now, commercial fleets do use their facilities all the time, but they’re not commuting on them. They’re not the primary customers. So their help desk, everything about their organization is geared towards their highest volume makes sense. That’s what you do, which leaves the commercial fleets that may not even be domiciles in that state to have to figure out how to manage that a that’s part of the one of the main challenges here. There are three main RF protocols. If a trucking company or fleet wants to maintain accounts across the country, you then have to figure out what devices do I need a toll management solution can come in and fix that and make sure that you have the right device for the right vehicle to maximize both discounts, but also make sure that you’re being charged properly for that for that vehicle. And then again, go back to the tolling authorities. Their service center is geared towards what I call one and done conversations, or two cars in the driveway, conversations. I have an easy pass account, and I can’t tell you the last time I went into my account to check it out, and I probably can’t tell you the last time I ever talked to the easy pass service center. It’s just not something that you have to do. But as a commercial operator that’s doing high volume, there are lots of reasons why you need to interact. And while the tolling system may become interoperable on device. I’m not hearing conversations that they’re interoperable on service. So for example, if I have my home account in New York and I drive down to Florida and I have a tolling issue in Florida where I received a paper bill inaccurately, or my vehicle is not properly registered, I would think I could call my New York service center and ask questions. In reality, they’re going to direct you down to Florida. So one of the challenges that a toll management solution provides to a commercial fleet is that one central point of contact to be able to handle issues between systems, between tolling providers, and that’s key deliverable on that. The other thing is centralized payment putting dollars down. In particular home agencies, causes commercial carriers to put down prepayment. And depending on where you put your prepayment down, you may have to be put a lot more cash and you want to a toll management solution like best pass will spread out, though that was premium prepayment dollars more accurately, because we aggravate accounts and we have relationships with the tolling authorities, we can fund accounts without necessarily having trucking companies having to put all of the dollars up front that they would have to on their own if they opened up accounts across the US. So that’s another key component that a toll management solution can provide a single bill, single payment, single device, single service center contact. And I think the single service center contact is key in that a company like like best pass, we get to know commercial needs. We get to know the toll facilities from a commercial point of view, so we know how to answer questions and address very commercial oriented needs and repetitive challenges. We also store data for a long period of time, so for auditing purposes, single point of access, we can interface with it, your IT solution, and be able to give you a single data set from across the country. That’s also very key. If you were to try to do that with yourself, in many cases, you may have to download Excel spreadsheets and whatnot. So again, we provide single, high tech interface, both for vehicles up and for Toll down. And we can also segregate that toll by cost center and be able to bring back to you the toll structured up appropriately for where you do business. You can assign the toll to particular regions or particular vehicles that, again, it aligns to business. Those are all things that a tolling authority. They’re not in the business of providing business services. They’re in the business of collecting money to operate their facility, so their help desk is very much geared for again, the. Two cars in the driveway.
So this is a fun map I like to show. So
this is a map of how the commercial fleet operators see the United States, right? Looks like the United States is a nice road network. And then this is an example of the map is typically how the toll world sees the same country they are rightly so. They are bonded and created to write and operate their facility. Their mission is not to make sure that they work with other facilities across the US. They are doing a great job. They are working hard to make sure that people can drive between regions without receiving a paper bill, and that the devices work. So I’m not belittling the effort that’s there, but at the end of the day, most of these facilities are were created to run the roads and bridges that they operate, and that, by its very nature, creates a disjointed kind of a system or network. A company like best pass brings that all together back into a cohesive network for really the customers that use the road work, work. Road network throughout the United States the most, and that’s commercial vehicles. While people take vacations and they move between regions, they’re not using the network. The network like a commercial fleet would use it. The basics of a toll management solution. Again, we’re going to kind of beat a dead horse here. Provides a single account, single monthly statement, a single point of payment, a single service center and single vehicle registration. Again, once you provide your vehicle information, both transpondered vehicles and non transponder vehicles, like low use vehicles on toll roads or trailers or even construction equipment that gets hauled behind it. Those license plates get picked up as well. All those vehicles can be registered with a toll management solution like best pass, and then it be broadcast out to the proper tolling authorities without any fuss or muscle. Again, you interface with best pass, or you go to our web portal, which is another point I need to make here. The web portal is very key. If you go to a tolling authority web portal, their primary goal is the two cars in the driveway. So everything about that portal is meant for a few vehicles on an account. If you’re a large fleet that has 1000s of vehicles and 1000s of trailers, a lot of times, those portals will struggle to be able to operate correctly. A toll management solution should provide a via a vehicle management solution on a portal that does take into account large numbers of vehicles, vehicle Management Association of transponders to vehicles, and the addition of vehicles that are not transpondered, like a trailer. That’s all very key here, and that’s why I point out here under right single vehicle registration, if you’re only going to touch your vehicles in the toll system, you only want to touch it once. You don’t want to be sending spreadsheets out all over to various different accounts. So that gets centralized and simplified. Again, with a high tech solution, you can upload a spreadsheet, or you can have your IT folks integrate directly and make all the vehicle registration and upkeep direct, comprehensive toll management tools, reports and services. It’s, again, this is a business centric solution. You are spending money on the toll roads. It is a very large expense that, for the most part, is can be managed by different groups within the trucking company or fleet. So it’s key to have a comprehensive set of management tools and reports that let you manage that expense from vehicles not properly registered and receiving Plate Toll. And they should not to violation management because they even at the end of the day due to weather or faulty equipment, violations still happen, and a toll management solution will process those violations, but you still want to see where are those violations happening? Is there something wrong with a vehicle that maybe I need to change a battery or whatnot? Those are all reports and tools that should be available through a toll management solution, and then obviously maximize discount on the road and keep operational overhead in your back office down there’s a lot of trucking and fleet operational work that has to happen managing toll, which is really just an expense, shouldn’t be one of them, and a toll management solution can keep that back office cost, which is kind of a hidden cost in toll, down to its minimum. I always say it’s one thing to pay the toll for using the road. It’s another thing to have to pay staff in overtime and whatnot, to be able to manage that expense. That’s that’s the part that we typically find is very painful for fleets. So how can we help? I think I’ve covered a lot of how fleet management, our toll management solution that best pass can help. We were founded in 2001 by truckers, for truckers, we’ve maintained that heritage over the last 10 years or so, 11 years, it’s been a long time, we have about 700,000 transponders deployed, 1.4 million total vehicles. Again, those are trailers and or low use vehicles that don’t need a transponder. And very proudly, the past two years, we’ve processed over a billion dollars in toll. And that’s a. Win, win for both fleets and for the toll operator, we move a lot of money very efficiently and keep the cost down, which allows us to pass along discounts to fleets. So that is, that’s where best pass helps. That’s where we’ve we’ve grown. We’ve done very well over the years. We have some of the best names and in trucking that call us a valuable partner. And it’s all around the things that I was, I was talking about getting that back office cost down is always been a linchpin to our success. I’m not going to hit this again, because I think I covered it all, centralized fleet toll management, a complete toll solution, user segments, if needed. We’re not simply a violation avoidance, I think is very clear to key to point out we do best pass does all it can to drive toll cost down to just the toll cost. So we are looking to deploy the right transponder solution or the plate solution based on your your company’s needs and travel patterns. So it’s key to know when you’re talking and looking at a toll management service, are they looking at your fleet as all the same? Are they looking at you fleet as unique, where some regions may not necessarily need a device that goes across the country, but would benefit from more of a local device? Those are all things that need to come into play that best, best does very well. We do take we run the gamut. We run we have owner operators up to mega fleets, and we also handle local fleets and national fleets. So there is a large utility company that their vehicles don’t go more than 10 or 15 miles from home base, but they have vehicles across the US. So they actually came to us for a national pull solution, but we are not deploying a national device. It’s a bit of a unique challenge. But you have the national pull problem, but you don’t, you don’t go everywhere again, single point of registration and services. I’m not going to hit that again and then no one’s left behind. I’ve said that before. We take great pride in serving everybody, from owner operators off to mega fleets. What we do is mesh technology with evaluated services to fix a pain point, and that pain point exists from the guy with one truck all the way up to mega fleets. Here’s a map just to show that we were we started in the northeast, so you see an awful lot of red there, but we have customers all across the US, so there’s tolling everywhere, again, most of the tollings in the east coast. So that makes sense as to why there’s a concentration there, and we add about between five and 7000 vehicles every month to again, to show
the value that we’re bringing, and we are saving money and time.
Here’s a comparison between best pass and self management. I think this is a good way to differentiate why you would need a toll management service over just managing toll accounts yourself. Probably the biggest one is maximize enhanced discounts, because we know the infrastructure, we know the devices, we know where to register them. To maximize those discounts, we can bring that to the table. We also are in a position to at our volume, to be able to extend those discounts. And as a philosophy, as a as an operating mode best pass is always passed along its discounts. We do not retain discounts as a source of revenue that is, again, served us very well. We charge a subscription fee per month per vehicle, and we pass along any of the savings that we’re able to negotiate to our customers, coast to coast single solution. If your fleet needs a coast to coast solution, we can provide that if you’re regional, we can provide that if you’re local. We can provide that with our with our business management tools. On top, we handle all vehicle registration, single statement integration, that’s either API, Excel spreadsheet, or human being going to a website and updating vehicles. We handle the full range of integration reporting, enhanced business reporting, cost center reporting, matching cost back to a vehicle to time of day. You can switch transponders between vehicles, and we will make sure that the costing moves with that transponder with that vehicle, even mid month. We can handle that a fleet center, Customer Portal, I pointed pointed that out, like I had all these here, toll violation processing is key. Like I say that the there are lots of reasons why violations still happen, while we minimize the violations by making sure your vehicles are properly registered. Inevitably, there’s a license plate that gets misread, or a leased piece of equipment that was not registered with best pass. Therefore we couldn’t register, register with the tolling authorities. So inevitably, violations happen, we handle that. That is something you you get the piece of paper in the mail, you scan it and send it to us, and it gets posted to your account, paid. And when we can, and where we can, we will get the fees waived for that fleet and business deployments. You’re not walking into a tolling authority and getting transponders. We are mailing transponders properly labeled for your unit to where you need them. So if you’re a large fleet, it’s spread out over many locations. That is something best pass can do for you and get the. The devices. So when you open the box the property labels for the unit, you walk up to the unit, put the device in, and it’s automatically paired to that unit. So relatively low lift, you still have to put the device in the window. But in everything else we take care of we’re your first your business partner. That’s we are in business to serve you. You pay us a subscription fee. We have to serve your needs. So that is something that keeps us, I won’t say, honest, because the tolling authorities are not dishonest, but they their primary focus is all the other vehicles. That is well, the volume of revenue that may come from commercial fleets is high. The fact of the matter is that their focus on the large volumes of two axle vehicles is where they have to put their energies towards. So we are here to bridge that gap for both sides, for both fleets and for the toll operator, no bonding requirements. Some of the tolling authorities require bonding in order to access the discounts. We can get you access to those same discounts with no bonding costs, which again, is a significant savings depending on your your volume and bonding requirements. Violation disputes. This is coming soon. This is an effort we have underway here at best pass to not only be able to pay your violations and get some amount of the fees waived, it’s actually actively disputes if you were Miss billed or a two axle license plate number was posted to your account because you have the same number but a different state. Those are all things that where we are putting technology in place to be able to do on behalf of our customers. And then coming soon as red light and parking and speeding citations, if you run a fleet that is operating in large cities, inevitably, these, these violations occur, and we are working to be able to process those, process those as we do for Toll again, I’m costed back to the vehicle when we can this next slide is a favorite picture of mine. This was a large company in Bentonville, Arkansas. We went and visited them, and they had some challenges with some violations. This is their loading document, just a few boxes of violations. So I would say a picture is worth 1000 words, we were able to, in very short order, make those boxes go away and then stop the inflow of the paper violations by properly registering vehicles and getting transponders and vehicles. This includes trailers. Again, I came under understate if you were pulling trailers, either your trailers leased equipment trailers or other companies trailers. It’s one of the niches that best pass has. It does very well. We are able to get plates everywhere and be able to get those vehicles covered with toll. So with that, I feel like I want 1000 miles an hour. I welcome questions.
Well, thank you, John. I will jump in here because we do already have several audience questions that have come in, so we will dig into those. And if you’d like to submit a question, type your question into the question window on the side of your screen and hit the submit button. And also, while we’re answering your questions, please complete the feedback form located on the bottom of your screen. Okay, John, so our first question is, prior initiatives sought to unify transponders into a one device fits all. Solution is that still being pursued.
It is, and there’s this progress being made. Best pass offers a single device with that will get you across the country, but the tolling industry is actually doing that too. But again, what I want to point out is that while you can use one device, it actually doesn’t remove the core challenge. For fleets across the United States, your vehicle now has less boxes in the window, but you still have to deal with independent tolling authorities. And critically, if you depending on where your home agency is, you may not receive discounts in away agencies. So while the utopian world of a single device is coming, I would predict in the next five years to 10 years, we will actually see that a vacationer can go across the country. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee the best toll costs for a commercial operator, which I think is going to be key?
Oh, that’s interesting. This is maybe a little related. This question is, can weigh station bypass be incorporated into a cashless tolling transponder?
It is we provide a device that you can register. You can open up an account with free pass, and is a device we provide that you can you can attach your waystation services to that device. We don’t provide waystation directly, but we do partner with pre pass and provide that capability. Okay?
And how accurate are these tolling gantries? What happens if they miss a transponder?
That is where the plate comes in. So there are lots of reasons, particularly in the northeast, with ice and snow and salt and whatnot, the readers can get a little gunked up and miss a transponder. Or what can happen is a windshield can break and the transponder get thrown away. That’s why license plates properly registered as the backup or key, because if it doesn’t read the transponder properly, it’ll take a picture license plate, and if it’s with Arc. Account, if you have an account with us, and it’s with our account, it would flow through just as if it was a transponder read, and then we would identify that it’s coming through by transponder and try to find out whether you need a replacement device. It was something in the lane at the time. All of that would happen, okay?
And this question is great, because highway funding and infrastructure funding is such a huge conversation right now, especially. But are there any new toll roads that we should anticipate in the near future?
Yes, I’m finding there’s everywhere I go in the conversations is always a drawing or set up for new tolls. Most of the roads in Texas seem to be at least being talked about, being told as a way to fund them. So where you do see new infrastructure, there will be told, be interesting to see how the M buff and the rock conversation influences that. But I do see Rhode Island is a great example of that. Connecticut they’re talking about how to fix their facilities. So I do see that coming a lot more.
Okay, and this is also related. What do you predict the tolling landscape will look like for commercial fleets in the next five years? And is every tolling facility going to go cashless?
Yes, I’ll answer the second part of that. First, absolutely, we’ll go cashless. There’s a couple of benefits that it gets rid of overhead and risk and safety. So the few facilities that are not all electronic and all cashless now will be so Ohio Indians, a few of them left Skyway. I do say within the next five years, they will seriously consider that what was the first part of the question?
Sorry, it was, what do you predict the tolling landscape will look like for commercial fleets in the next five years?
I think it’ll get more complicated. I think as facilities are told and gantries are put up, it’s going to be hard to keep track of what roads are now told and whatnot, and if you don’t have a management solution to help take care of that, you could find yourself with a glut of violations all of a sudden because your vehicles are not properly registered. I think you’ll see more of that when you won’t even know you’re on a toll road, and your drivers are going to have to figure that out or report it back when they go through a gantry. That’s probably I see the biggest change coming,
which could definitely get very, very difficult to manage if you have people reporting back like that, I’m sure. Our next question, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see with fleets that are managing their own tolls?
One off the top is the vehicles. A lot of times a trucking company will open up accounts and get transponders and think they have a handle on it, but they’re not religiously, routinely making sure that their vehicle license plates are properly registered. There’s a for large fleets is a constant turnover of vehicles, or if you’re pulling other people’s trailers, there’s a constant flow of license plates on your fleet. If that is not properly managed, that usually creates the boxes of paper that flows in. So that’s probably the one area we’ve seen that we come in and make an immediate difference. You provide us with that single set of vehicles, and then don’t worry about it, we make sure that the seven to 10 different facilities that require those vehicles properly registered or registered every day, and critically, we take the plates off that should come off. That’s another issue. You may upload your all your plates, but forget to remove plates of vehicles that you’ve sold or moved on or leased equipment that you no longer are using. Critically, if you don’t remove plates, you could find yourself being charged told that it’s not yours, but somebody else’s. So I, I would say the biggest thing is all going to be around plate management. After that, it’s managing cash flow. If you’re trying to manage your own accounts across the US, you’re going to have to push out an awful lot of prepaid dollars with a toll management solution. You can minimize that. You can you can actually deploy less cash in order to operate in the US, and you would if you were trying to manage your own separate accounts.
Okay, and let’s take on that finance idea. How much can a fleet save by switching to best pass?
It all depends. I get asked that all the time. It’s a loaded question. It depends on travel patterns, because some facilities have no differentiation for fleets. Others have big ones. The New York State Thruway has a 20% and Pennsylvania has a percent based on volume. And same thing with the bridges in New York, depending on your transponder, you could pick up a discount on the bridges in New York, New York, or not. So it all depends on travel patterns. So when you do talk to a toll management solution, make sure that they understand that and they look at your fleet travel patterns and try to understand where your fleets go, because in some cases, a local device may be better than a national device to make sure to maximize or reduce toll costs there. Okay, it’s going to range from range from zero, depending on. Where you go, and the only savings is going to be back office savings, or up to 32% 35% but it’s going to be based on travel patterns. I’m always reluctant to give a give a hard percent, because it really does depend on where you go.
Okay, absolutely, I think that makes perfect sense. Our next question, what are a few things that I can do right now to reduce the chance of violations for my fleet,
I’ll sign up with best pass that’s right away. I mean going back to the plate. Manage your plates very well. If you’re not going to go with a with a with a toll management service, make sure you’re managing your plates religiously to the day. Make sure you get your plates up and off of accounts. That’s probably the biggest thing. And if you are go, if you want to maximize your savings, use transponders. Make sure your transponders in your windows to make sure your toll cost is a minimum. If you go with a plate only solution, you will pay above and beyond the electronic rate. So those are probably the key things to keep your toll costs down.
And John, do you think that there’s any possibility that some sort of interoperability will ever extend across all of North America, or at least between the United States and Canada?
United States and Canada? I’m not seeing anytime soon. There’s not a lot of conversations. And typically, the cross border you deal with also funding, you know, I’m not funding, but cross border fees, international costs. I think a company like best pass, we are positioning ourselves. We are now talking about putting a, what we’re calling a cross border hub to be able to handle commercial traffic between the US and Canada. We have about 250 Canadian companies now that utilize our services to be able to pay to pay us and handle the US side of it, but I don’t see the interoperability, from a tolling point of view, happening anytime soon, particularly for commercial vehicles.
Okay, perfect. Well, we have actually been able to get through all of our audience questions. We do still have some time. So if you have a question, feel free to add it in. But John, I was just thinking this might be a good chance to even talk about when a fleet comes to you, what is sort of the onboarding process, and how do you help them determine where their problem areas are, and how you can help?
Yeah, we’re right up front in the sales process. We try to understand your fleet travel patterns, so we typically will get your toll statements and kind of look at where you travel that helps us determine the proper device for your vehicle. We also take a look at your violation patterns, because oddly enough, people may think they’re covered under their current accounts, and they’re not. So we typically look at that, and then we put together a program for your your vehicles, that matches that up. Then even an onboarding process. Once you’ve gone through that and you’ve given a thumb up, thumbs up to us, we then have an onboarding process where we understand your location, your vehicles. We get your unit numbers, and we match the right device with those unit numbers, we package it up in a box, and we send transponders to the right location to where a mechanic, or whoever the folks handling this can open the box, see the unit number, install it, and you’re pretty much up and running from that point on the transponders associated with the vehicle. And then the back office folks in the trucking company can then go to our portal or download the data through our APIs and do cost management on the toll side, with the vehicles matched to the transponder, matched to their travel patterns.
Okay, great. We had another question come in. How do you integrate with TMS? Is that something that you do integrate with transportation management systems?
Typically, since there’s so many of them, we typically have a generic import, either we do CSV or whatnot, we are talking to a couple of vendors on a more direct API set. We don’t have that in place yet, but typically we don’t have a problem, because we’re talking about vehicles out to us and toll back down. So the data sets are actually relatively straightforward. So we have not encountered too many, too many issues. So we have, again, API calls, if you have it people to do that integration, or most of the TMS systems have a CSV import, which we provide off of our portal.
Okay, and can you share what do you see as the future of best pass as a company?
Well, we’ve always prided ourselves on all the toll services we’ve done, and we’re going to continue to do that. We are finishing up the US footprint. There’s a handful of facilities American roads down in Alabama is coming on board, and this bridge of the gods, some small facilities that we’re trying to bring on board to fill it out. The bridges into Canada and the Canadian facilities themselves are all part of conversations that are going on. So I I feel very confident in the next year or two, we shall have the whole footprint of the US from the Mexican bridges all the way up through Canada. But after that, we see ourselves as a mobility payment service. One of the challenges I’ve seen doing toll is everybody wants to be in the mobility as a service space. Yes, the problem is, everybody wants to also be on the customer. Well, those two things kind of slice against each other. So best pass has the has the vision of being able to handle payments on a vehicle, which then brings together all these various mobility services under one umbrella, toll being an obvious one, that’s a clear vehicle payment. But there are other things, red light and parking citations are a vehicle expense. You could look at the ferry network in the United States. That’s a clear the moving toll bridge. That’s that fits very well into that model, but it allows us to aggregate and bring together these various payment needs on a vehicle for a commercial fleet, simplifying, you know what we’ve done in tolling, bring that to the other facilities and providers, I guess is the right word. That kind of simplicity for commercial foods well, and
I think it’ll be interesting to watch your growth, because you’ve already had so much growth as a company over the last several years. So definitely looking forward to seeing that as well. Perfect. Well, I think this concludes our time together. We’ve gotten through our questions, which is always great. Thank you so much, John for your time today. And I would like to remind everyone that the webcast will be available online at no charge for a year. You can find it on the fleet owner website. And thank you again, John for sharing your expertise, and thank you to best pass for sponsoring the event, and thank you, as always, to our viewers for joining us today. We hope that you’ll join us again for another fleet owner webcast. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.