Toll plaza operation is a critical component of roadway operations throughout the United States, as tolls provide both revenue for expansion and opportunity for demand management. Originally cash or physical currency based, tolling has morphed to meet the twentieth century demand in terms of throughput and efficiency in the form of electronic toll collection. Electronic tolling has introduced a new form of driver decision making at toll plazas due to the additional payment choice. Despite the user convenience these facilities provide to consumers, this form of collection has not come without safety and operational concerns. Confusion at the toll plaza, unsafe merging maneuvers, and the unexpected behavior has actually increased certain crash patterns at toll plazas in some electronic tolling facilities. Building upon existing research, further work was completed to quantify the related impacts of electronic toll collection on traffic operations through a microsimulation model, and static evaluation study. While in Massachusetts overall toll plaza crashes are a minimal portion of 200,000 crashes each year in the Commonwealth at less than 0.1 percent of all crashes some toll plazas have higher crash rates than the state wide urban interstate average. Interchange 14 in Weston, Massachusetts had the highest crash rate among state toll plazas. Rear-end and same direction sideswipe collisions accounted for the highest crash numbers between the years 2010 and 2012. Microsimulation of various lane configurations derived from static evaluation feedback on driver decision making created six alternate configurations. Current plaza configuration was verified by the validated VISSIM microsimulation model to be the highest performing in terms of efficiency. A lane configuration with grouped payment lanes provided the best overall performance for alternatives with less than 1 percent difference from the current West Springfield interchange configuration. Static evaluation and microsimulation results pointed to increased efficiency and safety benefits with combination lanes. Additionally, drivers tended to avoid following heavy vehicles through plaza lanes. Motorists were willing to make up to 3 lane changes to avoid queues and may avoid combination lanes as an electronic toll customer if they anticipate a greater delay than an adjacent dedicated electronic lane. Recommendations for future research include: 1) further microsimulation modeling to examine traffic flow and safety impacts at toll plazas under varying traffic conditions and demand with open road tolling lanes strategies; and 2) developing enhancements to VISSIM to address parameter limitations associated with discrete choice modeling at toll plazas.

A great deal of research has been conducted on Central Florida toll roads to better understand the characteristics of the tolling operation. In this thesis, the development and calibration of a toll plaza simulation models will be analyzed using two simulation programs varying mostly in their modeling theory. The two models utilized are, SHAKER, a deterministic queuing model for vehicles utilizing toll collection facilities, and VISSIM, a globally popular stochastic simulation software. The benefits of simulation models leads to the purpose of this thesis, which is to examine the effectiveness of two toll modeling programs that are similar in purpose but vary in approach and methodology. Both SHAKER and VISSIM toll plaza models have the potential to work as a tool that can estimate the maximum throughput and capacity of toll plazas. Major operational benefits resulting from developing these models are to simulate and evaluate how traffic conditions will change when demand increases, when and if queues increase when a lane is closed due to maintenance or construction, the impact of constructing additional lanes, or determining whether or not the best lane type configuration is currently implemented. To effectively calibrate any model available site data must be used to compare simulation results to for model validity. In an effort to correctly calibrate the SHAKER toll plaza tool and VISSIM model, an extensive field collection procedure was conducted at four Florida Turnpike operated toll facilities located in Central Florida. Each site differed from the others in terms of number of lanes, lane configuration, toll base fee, highway location, traffic demand, and vehicle percentage. The sites chosen for data collection were: the Lake Jesup Mainline Plaza along the Seminole Expressway (SR-417), the Beachline West Expressway Toll Plaza along the SR-528, the Daniel Webster Western Beltway Plaza along SR-429, and the Leesburg Toll Plaza along the Florida Turnpike Mainline SR-91. Upon completion of calibration of the two simulation models it is determined that each of the two software are successful in modeling toll plaza capacity and queuing. As expected, each simulation model does possess benefits over the other in terms of set up time, analysis reporting time, and practicality of results. The SHAKER model setup takes mere seconds in order to create a network and input vehicle, another few seconds to calibrate driving parameters, and roughly 10 additional seconds to report analysis. Conversely, setting up the VISSIM model, even for the most experienced user, can take several hours and the report analysis time can take several more hours as it is dependant on the number of required simulation runs and complexity of the network. VISSIM is most beneficial by the fact that its modeling allows for driver variability while SHAKER assumes equilibrium amongst lane choice and queuing. This creates a more realistic condition to observed traffic patterns. Even though differences are prevalent, it is important that in each simulation model the capacity is accurately simulated and each can be used to benefit operational situations related to toll plaza traffic conditions.