How Toll Management will Improve Fleet Operations

Brian, Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar how toll management will improve fleet operations, presented by best pass. I’m Brian peach with heavy duty trucking, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s event. Before we get started with today’s session, I encourage you to ask questions during the webinar at any point, and we’ll try to address all of them. However, if we do not get to yours, don’t worry, you’ll be contacted by email with a response after the event. Also, I encourage you, we request that after the webinar, you take a moment to fill out a post event survey. Your feedback is very valuable to us. Our presenter today is Heather. Nolan Heather joined best pass in 2009 with more than 19 years of systems analysis, design, software development and project leadership experience. She has been instrumental in the evolution of the company from a discounted toll service to a comprehensive payment platform provider and leader in toll management solutions for commercial fleets of all shapes and sizes. And with that, I’d like to hand it over to Heather. Heather. Please begin
Good afternoon, and thank you for taking the time to join us for this webinar. Today, we will be discussing how a strong toll management solution can eliminate some of the biggest challenges a fleet faces when managing the cost of toll. Toll is typically the third to sixth largest daily fleet expense, and can be one of the most challenging ones to manage and control. We all know it. Toll is not your business. It’s a by product of having to travel on the toll roads and get your goods services or people to their destination if you’re traveling the toll roads, especially if you’re traveling extra regionally, a strong toll management philosophy must be part of your operating policies to ensure this expense is managed appropriately. As part of our discussion today, I will update you on how some industry trends and recent events are affecting the future of tolling and therefore affecting your business. We will also review common challenges faced when managing toll and ways you can increase your efficiency, productivity and savings with a good toll management solution. We will give you a better understanding of cashless tolling, how it’s expanding on the roadways and the impact of this expansion to your business. We will cover the four biggest challenges that your business faces when managing toll. We will identify some practical ways you can eliminate these challenges and improve your bottom line, and we will cover the benefits you can realize by outsourcing your toll management with a company like best pass. There are over 50 different tolling authorities in the United States operating throughout 29 states and covering over 6000 miles of toll roads. As we all know, there are ongoing discussions and debates on how to fund the infrastructure improvements identified as necessary to keep our roadways safe to operate on a government supported infrastructure plan could help this, but it is not going to create all the funding needed for all states. Technology advancements and broader adoption and availability of electronic vehicles are also impacting gas tax revenues and leading states to research other funding avenues like mileage based user fees. Given these trends, it is safe to assume an increase in toll facilities or other usage based fees must be expected and planned for in the future. Although some toll authorities work together in groups to create regional interoperability, each authority still operates independently, and there is no overarching body governing all of our tolling or requiring them to work together in a specific way. This leads to different policies and procedures, both on the roads and in back offices and customer service centers that can cause understandable confusion. This requires companies that travel on more than one roadway to understand and navigate these differences, to operate efficiently when managing their own toll,
when a fleet needs to operate extra
regionally, or sometimes even within a tolling region, they often must deal with more than one toll authority for a variety of reasons. Typical scenarios are the need for multiple transponders to provide electronic toll coverage, which leads to multiple toll accounts, toll invoices and payments. A lack of understanding of toll interoperability can lead to receipt of violations or paper bills from different roadways, and the need to then call different service centers for support when you have issues. I stood in a lobby one day that housed two different tolling authorities. The call centers were both located in the same lobby. I watched a customer walk up to one side, talk to a customer service rep, discuss for a few minutes, then gather his papers back up and walk to the other side and wait in line to talk to a customer service representative from the other tolling authority. This happened. Him two more times before he left, presumably with his issue resolved, both service centers were doing their job and trying to support their customer, but the difference in how authorities are owned and operate creates this complexities for all parties involved. All of this leads to overhead and redundancy that if managed in house, takes you away from time spent on your core business needs, or if unmanaged, creates the potential for higher than necessary expense. Over the past five years, cashless tolling, volume, also known as all electronic tolling, or at has increased by over 76% 26 of the 29 states that have toll roads have some form of cashless capability, and the rest are soon to follow. The impacts of covid 19 have led to many tolling authorities choosing to go all cashless much sooner than expected or planned, and an effort to create a self and safe and healthy toll environment. In a cashless tolling environment, toll booths are very often removed, and tolling equipment is installed on overhead gantries or existing infrastructure like bridges. As the vehicle approaches the gantry, the sensors try to pick up a transponder signal, and as a backup, take pictures of the front rear, or sometimes both license plates, additional equipment like weigh in motion scales and axle counters are installed to assist in determining vehicle classification to charge the correct toll rates. If the transponder or license plate are found active on a toll account, the toll will be posted to that account. If there is no transponder and the license plate is not registered on a toll account, then the authorities will do a DMV lookup to identify the registered owner of the vehicle and issue a violation or paper toll bill, typically at a higher rate. Cashless tolling has many benefits, but also many challenges for the driver on the road. It creates a faster, more seamless travel experience by not having to stop at toll booths and wait in lines to pay for your toll. It also means drivers do not have to carry cash, thereby reducing risk at trust truck stops and on low travel roadways, as we are all now experiencing in relation to the covid 19 pandemic, cashless tolling also increases your driver’s health safety by reducing person to person contact and the safety of their own families and the people they come in contact with. While all this benefits the driver and makes traveling much simpler, cashless tolling can create complicated back office processes and require greater time and attention to be spent on toll management activities. On cashless toll roads, there was no ability to pull up to a toll booth have a toll adjusted or ask a question. I’ve often heard the question, do I still need a transponder? And my answer is always the same, if you travel toll roads more than sporadically and want to keep your cost as low as possible, then yes, it might seem easier to just let your license plate be read and get the toll via a paper bill, but toll by plate is more expensive for the tolling authorities to process, and therefore more expensive for you. Toby plate is also less accurate. It relies on optical character recognition or manual review, and often dirt, snow, ice or glare can make it hard to accurately identify the correct letters or numbers on a license plate. Additionally, some states issue the same license plate number for different vehicle classifications, like passenger and commercial or trucks and trailers, which makes Plate Toll posting even more complex. This all leads to potential Miss billing and issues that need to be identified and resolved. If you forget to register your license plates, you will not only be billed at a higher rate, but you can lose out on some discounts and also be charged additional fees to cover that higher cost to process, as mentioned previously, states are looking to expand roads that are told and will either install new equipment like roadside or overhead gantries or use existing infrastructure like bridges, this can make it hard to identify when a road is tolled or not, leading to uncertainty as to where you need a toll account. This increases your chances of receiving ad hoc paper bills from a variety of sources, including toll facilities and leased equipment providers. If you lease or rent parts of your fleet, these paper bills can arrive anywhere from a week to two or three months after the toll actually happened, creating serious challenges re billing or cost accounting your toll. What about interoperability? For those that might not recognize that term, interoperability. Is the ability to use one transponder for tolling everywhere. Well, at least everywhere in the United States, there was a federal transportation law called the moving ahead for progress in the 21st Century Act, or map 21 that mandated national interoperability by 2016 as anybody who drives more than one to two states knows this never came to fruition. You still need at least two to three transponders to drive with the lowest toll cost from coast to coast. The industry is, however, making progress, and within the next two to three years, we expect one transponder to be accepted by all major tolling authorities in the United States, the fact that one transponder works, however, does not guarantee you the lowest toll cost. Many states over the past few years have created policies whereby only a locally issued transponder, or home transponder, will receive the lowest electronic toll rate, and we don’t expect that to change with interoperability. Each agency will still make their own policies about who gets what toll rate and how plates and away transponders are handled. Furthermore, many of the smaller, independent tolling agencies in states like Alabama, Michigan and the US and Canadian border bridges have not joined the larger tolling agency hubs and might not ever join them. These facilities will not necessarily be part of the interoperability effort and will still require individual toll accounts and transponders. Interoperability will work where it works, on most major toll roads, and most importantly, when it works the issues of plate misreads, faulty equipment and unregistered plates will still result in rate discrepancies and paper bills that must be handled with the tolling agency who manages that specific toll road, regardless of where you have your toll account, registered private consumers or the two cars in a driveway customer make up the largest customer volume for most tolling agencies, in some cases, close to 95% of A tolling agency’s customers are private consumers. Because of this, customer service centers are geared to handle private consumer type calls and do not have extensive knowledge of fleet issues that result from heavy toll road travel support and assistance for other roadways will still require a call to each individual tolling agency for accurate answers. Bottom line, even with one transponder that works on all major toll roads fleets, must still understand all the intricacies of the tolling world to manage toll effectively. With the trends in cashless tolling, expansion of toll roads or user based fees, and the constant evolution in the tolling industry, it’s clear that toll management challenges are not going away. Next, we’ll recap what these challenges are and how a strong toll management solution will continue to be a critical part of your business. If you are self managing your toll you must deal with paperwork and constant administrative tasks to make sure your toll accounts are properly set up and your fleets configured correctly, as mentioned previously, to receive the best toll rates possible during extra regional travel, most fleets must open multiple toll accounts and install multiple transponders when you have multiple toll accounts, this means every administrative task must be done multiple times, once for each toll account,
every account must be funded based on that toll agency’s business rules. Every vehicle addition or removal requires a website update or phone call. If you don’t remember to remove a vehicle that is no longer driving for your fleet, you are responsible for any toll that is incurred and must either pay it or spend hours gathering proof and disputing the toll. If you do not remember to add a vehicle that is new to your fleet, you will end up with violations and paper toll bills, many with administrative fees that can be greater than the actual toll itself. You have multiple payments to make, multiple account balances to track and multiple invoices to reconcile each month. Often, the amount of funds you must keep on account based on each tolling agency’s policy is greater than that which would be required if it were all under one toll account, you will then be receiving toll data from multiple sources in multiple formats. Most fleets want to cost their toll back to the vehicle so it can either be billed back to your customer, monitored and tracked as an overhead expense. Used for projecting budgets or pricing for future contracts, you will receive your toll data with the transponder number, and you must match that back to the vehicle that transponder was in at the date and time of the transaction in order to record the expense accurately. Additionally, approximately 3% of all electronic tolls will result in a misread. A misread is when a transponder is not read correctly and you are charged a toll that is higher than what you should be charged. You must know how each tolling authority records a misread and comb through your toll bill, looking for these anomalies in order to dispute them. Then you must know the different dispute procedures, documentation requirements and accepted time frames for each toll agency and ensure you submit your disputes timely for processing.
Many disputes require
follow up to ensure they do not get lost in the sea of paperwork and submissions that flood a customer service center daily if you don’t identify and dispute these misreads, these extra charges could result in a bill that is up to 60% more than it should be. The result of all this paperwork and added administrative tasks is inefficiency, wasted staff time, and worse, a drain on your bottom line. You are spending time managing toll when that time should be spent managing other aspects of your business. A toll management provider can help eliminate this inefficiency by consolidating the multiple tolling accounts into a single bill, giving a more meaningful picture of toll usage and expenses across the fleet. A single bill also means a single payment, a single website and a single place where updates must be made, thereby greatly reducing the amount of time spent on toll management activities, sometimes by up to 85%
managing multiple transponders from different toll accounts can also be an all consuming job tracking vehicle to transponder assignments and keeping that history over time so you can cost your toll accurately, can be a tedious and overwhelming task. You also need to become an expert on how you need to outfit your fleet to gain the most savings and best coverage. You need to know what transponder works, where what the deposit or prepaid funding rules are and how to properly install the transponder in your vehicle to ensure they are read successfully, you have to know which toll agencies to order new or replacement transponders from how many of which type of transponder you will need, and be dependent on multiple fulfillment centers to receive your transponders to outfit Your vehicles properly, you must also keep on top of truck routes and transponder usage carefully to ensure you can identify potential misreads or unauthorized transponder use due to transponder borrowing or theft. You must also say current on toll industry changes in regards to toll interoperability, as agencies make progress on toll and transponder interoperability, you could unknowingly end up with two transponders that work for the same location, while most tolling agencies try to identify this and not double bill a vehicle. There are unresolved technical issues and challenges that can cause this to result in a duplicate charge, you must monitor for these duplicate charges, as you do for misreads or unauthorized use. Additionally, when a windshield is broken or a transponder is lost or stolen, you must make sure you deactivate the transponder in a timely manner to ensure you are not billed for Toll or service fees that are no longer applicable. Often, if you are taking advantage of some of the volume discounts available, you must remember to deactivate this transponder with more than one tolling agency and add in the replacement transponder, ensuring that you qualify for discounts. Going forward, if you use a toll management provider, you’ll likely have access to on demand reporting by truck route day and month, giving you access to vehicle toll trends and alerting you to anomalies that require your attention, you will most likely have access to a single web portal that lets you activate and deactivate transponders with a click of a mouse or fleet tools lets you automate this process entirely.
As much as we’d like electronic tolling to work perfectly, that’s just not the case, as with many of the other tools and systems we use daily in our lives, equipment fails, battery dies, weather causes issues and systems have hiccups, which cause incorrect tolls. When these things happen, you must identify them yourselves and handle it often by contacting a Customer Service Center. Even if you are using a transponder that has some form of interoperability and works on multiple toll roads, you will still have to contact the service center of the toll road the misread or miss Bill occurred on most service centers are staffed and. Trained to support the private consumer or two cars in a driveway and are not versed in fleet issues like extra regional travel and regular vehicle replacements, chances are the service center you need to contact might be in a different state or region that you are not very familiar with, and you must know the rules of their road to effectively advocate for your issue. The other option is to try to self service and resolve your issues online via a web portal. However, again, most web portals are built to support the private consumer and are not made to handle fleets with hundreds or 1000s of vehicles and transponders. Some portals just sit and spin as you try to log in or search for a specific vehicle or toll, and some simply aren’t able to show you all the data you need to identify and resolve an issue. You must keep track of the different logins for your different toll accounts and know how to navigate the site and what information is required for a toll or billing dispute with each agency. Having to navigate this maze and know who to call and what steps to take is very inconvenient, frustrating and time consuming. None of us like to spend time on the phone resolving an issue that we believe should never have happened in the first place. Not knowing all the different rules and policies can lead to lack of resolution and having to pay for unnecessarily toll or violations using a toll management provider allows fleets to avoid this burden. Toll management providers have both the expertise and connections to clear up issues without resolving the fleet. Some will even identify the toll issue without you having to do anything on your own, thereby streamlining the process even more.
While electronic tolling provides the best toll rates, you must know what transponder to use for what routes to receive that optimized rate. You must know where each vehicle is going to travel and which transponders to put in that vehicle each day to ensure they are billed at the lowest cost. As interoperability expands, this means your transponder works more places, but does not necessarily mean you will receive the best rates in all those locations. In addition to providing transponder discounts, many tolling authorities also offer commercial fleet volume discounts based on frequency of travel or volume of tolls. Some of the discounts that are currently available are in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Colorado, with savings up to 20% to make it easier for you to access this discount. Some toll authorities allow you to register an away transponder with them and then Bill you direct for the toll. This, however, requires constant monitoring and updating to ensure your vehicle and transponders are correctly registered for each discount program, and regular occurrences like fleet replacements are not forgotten about. It also requires that you travel in that one state enough to reach the frequency or volume required to receive the discount. A tolling management provider will negotiate agreements with tolling agencies that enable them to pass on these discounts to small and medium sized fleets, even though they would not be able to take advantage of them on their own. Even large fleets that might get this discount on their own very often do not have the necessary management tools in place to ensure that all vehicles are registered correctly, and thereby leave part of the discount unrealized. Toll management providers are constantly working with all the different tolling agencies to gain access to the best rates and discounts passed on to their customers.
Best pass provides a comprehensive payment platform with a focus on nationwide toll management for commercial fleets of all shapes and sizes, we have been simplifying toll management for fleets and owner operators for 20 years. We are not for or against coal toll. We simply make toll management simple. We were founded by truckers for truckers, and have kept that philosophy over the years that we as we have grown, we also know that the best way to save money for fleets is to also save money for the toll authorities. So we constantly work to provide a solution that will create savings for all sides of tolling. We call this our win, win win philosophy, our four toll pillars are four pillars of toll and payment management are accuracy, expertise, consolidation and savings, everything we do focuses on achieving at least one of those pillars, well, that and having fun while doing it. Let’s face it, toll management is not considered fun. Anyone who manages their own toll and tries to talk about it at a part of your event. Knows what I’m talking about, but we do try to make our days fun and ensure that any customer interaction is enjoyable and successful, something I hope everyone listening has or gets a chance to experience someday. Best pass works to ensure your toll is accurate by providing daily toll audits. For automated misread identification and correction and violation mitigation and processing. We know what to look for to identify toll misreads, and then we use your fleet travel patterns to identify the most likely corrected toll plaza and rate and ensure you receive the right credit for the overcharge. If you receive a violation, you just send it to us, we pay it and the via, add the vehicle to your account, thereby reducing the chance of future violation, and post that violation to your account as a toll. This ensures the violations are visible, trackable, and included in toll trends, along with your normal toll travel. The other benefit you receive from coming on board with best pass is that we manage toll for 1000s of commercial fleets with close to 2 million vehicles under our management. This means that we see a broader spectrum of toll trends and issues, and use this knowledge to benefit all fleets under our management. What might appear as a single toll issue to a fleet can be seen as a more wide, widespread issue when looking across multiple fleets, when we identify these issues, we immediately start working with the tolling authority to help them identify the root cause and then work to resolve and credit any financial burden created as a result of the issue. While working with fleets both large and small, best pass has gained both broad and very specific industry knowledge by partnering and working with our fleet customers and tolling partners to absorb and learn all that we can. We have built an expansive knowledge base that allows us to serve our customers and solve most toll problems quickly and efficiently, and if needed, have the necessary context to escalate and resolve quickly. We have created tools like Empower reporting and exclusion zone noting notifications to surface trends and anomalies that allow you to self serve and identify tolling factors that need consideration. We use our monthly newsletter targeted customer notifications and social media to share industry news and updates that could impact your business. A key factor in simplifying toll management is consolidation. I’ve spoken about all the redundant and expensive work necessary when managing multiple toll accounts and coming on board with best pass solves those problems. With best pass, you have one place to go for all toll payments, reporting and questions. You receive one bill for Toll across all facilities within our network, creating a much easier reconciliation process and streamlined analysis and planning capabilities. Log into our customer portal to add or remove a vehicle, update a transponder, assignment or mark a transponder is lost, and we take care of updating all the appropriate tolling authorities with that information for you. Last but not least is the savings that we provide by managing your toll. For you, we create back office efficiencies that let you get back to your core business. We provide you with the best possible discounts and rates on all major toll roads in the United States, and are constantly working to expand our network. We work with you to analyze your travel patterns and pain points to suggest the best toll solution possible to meet your needs. We can deploy a nationwide transponder solution, a regional solution with centralized toll management, a plate solution as backup, or when transponders don’t make business sense, or a hybrid combination of both plates and transponders configured to your fleet needs. Consolidating all toll with us also reduces the amount of money tied up in multiple toll deposits and bonds, creating up cash for use in other areas of your business.
In closing, I hope you are
either already taking advantage of the benefits best pass provides, or will consider doing so in the future. But more importantly, I hope you have learned more about toll management, the important role it plays in your business and the options you have to make it more time and cost effective as part of your daily operations.
A I’ll turn it back to Brian for questions and answers.
Thank you so much, Heather, fantastic job. Very informative. With the time remaining we have today, we’re going to go ahead and address the questions that have been submitted throughout the presentation, and please, I encourage you to continue submitting them as we go on here again, if we don’t get to them, someone from Best pass will be getting back to you after the event. So again, I’m going through these, and one of the big ones that have come in, you know, what about the future? What’s the next five years. I mean, do you really see tolling facilities going cashless? What do you see? What does it look like for commercial fleets in the next five years?
Yes, I think cashless is going to continue to be a focus of many, actually, all of the tolling agents. These, there are some agencies that are making conscious decisions to continue to support cash payments, or sometimes credit card payments. They are all reducing the number of lanes or locations where you can do that, and expanding the cashless capabilities. Cashless is really, overall, a win win for all parties, and makes travel much safer and much more seamless. In addition, we had a conference just this past week for ibtta, which is the tolling authority conference side of the house, and every single one of them is talking about expansion of toll and or mileage based user fees as a way to achieve the revenue needed to keep and maintain the toll roads, and even with the user based fees, the need for centralized payments of that policy is going to still pertain and best pass is involved with many pilot conversations that are ongoing as far as how we continue to utilize our centralized payments and continue to simplify That for tolls per fleet throughout, excuse me.
Great and for all of our fleet managers out there, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see with fleets that are managing their own toll
so the two biggest mistakes I see are not really understanding the toll programs available and not keeping their equipment up to date with Toll accounts that they do have. We worked with one customer who actually postponed coming on board with us because they had to figure out a way to present the estimated savings in a way that wouldn’t put in question the job they had been doing and how they had been managing toll over the prior years. They didn’t realize the savings they could recognize simply by using a different transponder for part of their fleet. And honestly, I think the biggest mistake is thinking that your toll doesn’t really need to be managed. I don’t have a toll management issue. Is a common comment that we hear and can very often prove to be incorrect. You may not have a toll management issue, but there is almost always rooms for saving by adopting a toll management solution.
I bet. Yeah, great.
Do you think here’s one here? Do you think that there’s any possibility that some sort of interoperability will ever extend across all North America, or at least between the US and Canada.
So cross border interoperability is being discussed by some agencies, but it’s currently being driven more by individual border states and provinces that are affected, as opposed to as an overall industry conversation, agreeing on a common transponder is actually the easy part, and I can see that happening, but handling cross border payments and currency differences and exchanges is something that is going to take the industry much longer, longer To figure out we’re looking at, like I said, probably two to two to four or five years for United States interoperability. And I think the North America interoperability is, is going to be years beyond that before it is, is really seamless across across the entire North America.
Great. And let’s see here, what are a few things that I can do right now to reduce the chance of violations for my fleet.
So the biggest thing you can do right now is ensure that
your equipment is updated
as you have new fleets, new vehicles. Enter your fleet and leave your fleet, keeping that information updated on any toll accounts you have or with your toll management provider is critical. The sooner you can get those license plates updated and registered for Toll management, the sooner they’ll be out on the roadways, and then we’ll reduce those violations and paper bills that come in delayed and again, at a much higher cost.
Okay, here’s a new one.
Are disputes handled by a specific toll authority, or can disputes be handled through a best pass account? Yeah.
So disputes would be if you are on board with best pass, disputes would be submitted to best pass, and then we will manage those and pass those through to the authorities, following up on them, and then reconciling any received credits back to your account through best pass, and then passing those credits through. And because we have the contacts across all the tolling authorities that we work with, we work directly with 29 different tolling authorities right now, we have the ability to get those submitted and processed in normally a much more timely and efficient manner than you would on your own.
Great and, you know, obviously the big question, you know, everyone’s probably wondering, how much can
fleet save by switching to best pass?
Savings can really vary based on the size of the fleet and where as a rough estimate. However, we have calculated that for a fleet of, say, 100 vehicles, regardless of location, we save approximately 16 hours per month, as noted earlier in the presentation. We have fleet testimonials with recognized time savings of up to 85% total savings difficult to predict, as that is largely based on your travel location, and toll rates differ dramatically from coast to coast, so typically, a deeper analysis must be done for that. And anybody that’s interested on coming on board with best pass has the ability to share those existing toll statements and toll trends and costs, and then we can analyze that against the savings that we can produce and with transponders or plate based tolling, and configure your fleets To receive the optimal rates that are available.
Great. Well with that, we’ll wrap up today any questions that were submitted and we didn’t get to that will be addressed again after today’s event, and so please look out for those responses. Again. I would like to thank best pass for their time today, and of course, Heather Nolan for her expertise. We hope that you all enjoyed today’s webinar and keep an eye out for other ones coming down the pike. And I also want to mention that an on demand version of this webinar will be available
on the HDT website, at trucking info.com/webinars,
again, appreciate everyone’s time. Heather, again, thanks again for your expertise, and have a great day. Everyone. Thank you.