How fleets can benefit from toll management

A tolling management solution provides an electronic toll collection means for trucks to provide automated payments from their pre-paid accounts at toll roads and stations, according to John Andrews, president and chief executive officer of Bestpass, which handles hundreds of thousands of trailers for its customers, who are running more than $1.7 million in toll every day across the country.

“This payment method automatically replenishes a payment account when the available balance decreases to a certain threshold,” he says. “The devices that enable this are usually transponders or tags attached to a windshield or license plate. One of the most practical use-cases is when a tolling solution is paired with a weigh station bypass solution to make the driver’s job as simple as possible, even saving them valuable time.

“Whenever possible,” he continues, “we will submit complete lists of trailer plates to tolling authorities on behalf of our customers. Submitting a trailer plate list—and constantly keeping it up to date—is a critical tool in mitigating violations, which can be extremely costly and hard to manage for commercial fleets.”

“A toll management service like PrePass Plus takes the hassle out of tolling administration,” says Andrew Joyce, PrePass Plus program manager. “We work with tolling agencies to provide PrePass customers with centralized services and one consolidated bill, including volume discounts through some of these agencies. We also manage all carrier toll disputes through final resolution. PrePass’ Inform Tolling is a new data visualization tool that provides customers with oversight of their toll costs and tolling activity.”

Fleets need data to help manage their business to be profitable. The rising costs of tolls can easily and very quickly get into millions of dollars for some fleets. Multiplied across the large number of different agencies, managing tolls is very time consuming and very expensive for fleets to do on their own, according to Drew Anderson, Bestpass’s director of carrier relations.

“Inform Tolling is designed to provide fleets data they can quickly access using data visualization to help them see what is going on,” he says. “This means they don’t have to sort through a lot of data to try to find a needle in the haystack. We present the data in a manner that is very intuitive and leads them to where issues and opportunities may be. We also help them communicate that data to the people within their organization. Data for the sake of data doesn’t do anybody any good unless you can take action on it.”