Tolplan - Toll Road Management, Engineering and Consulting

Tolplan is an independent South African company of professional engineers and financial and information technology professionals who offer a variety of specialized toll road management and engineering consulting and information technology services. The full-time core personnel of the company amounts to about 40.

Toll road management, engineering and consulting services and solutions

The mission of Tolplan is to provide innovative, comprehensive and cost-effective toll consulting services and solutions to toll authorities and concessionaires.

To achieve these services, several innovative approaches are used, including:

• The combination of professional project management techniques with toll expertise to provide a unique toll project management service
• A combination of creative transportation modelling and reality checks (origin-destination or numberplate surveys and observed reaction to toll) to predict toll traffic more accurately
• The integration of expertise from multiple disciplines to provide a cost-effective and functional toll facility development process and product
• Toll management information services beyond typical consulting services, i.e. services based on experience in the development, installation and support of a toll MIS.

Electronic toll collection (ETC) technology

Tolplan also have great experience in the creative application of non-stop electronic toll collection technology to achieve a reduction of toll-related capital, operating and maintenance costs and/or a toll plaza capacity increase.

The company has been responsible for the formulation of national ETC standards in Greece and South Africa and is currently assisting Transit New Zealand with the planning and implementation of a proposed free flow ETC system with a countrywide toll customer and management system.

Control centres and toll plazas

The expertise of Tolplan also extends to cost-effective conceptual detailed design of control centres with centralised remote supervision of satellite plazas by using technological aids such as voice, video and data communication by means of fibre-optic or other links (instead of independent toll plazas with multiple supervisory staff and facilities).

A toll facilities operational philosophy and plan, taking into consideration traffic, toll collection, information, financial and maintenance management, is prepared as the point of departure for all facility design.

Toll road services

The services rendered since 1982 in the field of toll roads, both in South Africa and internationally, by Tolplan cover all phases of toll projects from the project viability phase through the implementation phase to the operational phase and include:

• Toll financing policy studies
• The formulation of alternative tolling strategies and the modelling of traffic reaction to toll
• Economic and financial feasibility studies of state, build-operate-transfer (BOT) and shadow toll projects
• Multi-disciplinary toll plaza planning and design, including configurations for non-stop ETC
• Project management and multi-disciplinary toll plaza construction supervision and contract management
• ETC standardisation, specifications and applications
• Toll collection equipment and toll management information systems: design, documentation and procurement contract management
• Specifications, tender documentation, procurement process and contract management of comprehensive toll road operations and maintenance contracts
• Tender documentation and adjudication of build-operate-transfer (BOT) projects
• Toll and traffic specialists in independent engineer teams on BOT projects

All these services and the overall project management, co-ordination and integration of the various disciplines involved in toll roads are still being offered by Tolplan.

Tolplan have considerable international experience having been involved in toll projects in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.