ePass electronic toll collection formally launched

The Ministry of Transport (MoT) yesterday cooperated with Vietnam Digital Transport JSC. (VDTC – a member of Viettel) to officially introduced ePass – an electronic toll collection for road traffic at Hoa Lac – Hoa Binh toll tower (on Hanoi – Hoa Binh Express Way). This system is developed by VDTC under the direct management of MoT and Vietnam Directorate for Roads.

ePass electronic toll collection formally launched

Beginning from January 1, 2021, all 35 toll towers nationwide using ePass will be in synchronous operation as instructed by the Prime Minister.

With this achievement, Viettel has successfully completed the project on schedule, with an increase of over 80 percent compared to the total number of existing toll towers built during the previous 4 years.

ePass takes advantage of the most modern technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to reduce registration time to around 1 minute, or Online Charging System (OCS) developed by Viettel itself to increase the speed of vehicles passing toll towers by 60 times. Remarkably, this OCS is linked to ViettelPay so that drivers do not need to deposit money into their traffic account.

MoT and Viettel aim at making Vietnam enter the top-10 nations using electronic toll collection (ETC)  in the region. Viettel’s General Director Le Dang Dung shared that his corporation is planning to develop integrated platforms to share databases among IT systems, to manage toll collection and digital paying. They will serve the task of boosting smart traffic in the nation.

Deputy Minister of Transport Le Dinh Tho commented that ePass is truly a lever for the growth of digital traffic in Vietnam.

The second stage of the project ‘Electronic Toll Collection for Road Traffic’ will follow the Build-Own-Operate model (BOO), which is a Public Private Partnership (PPP) one where Viettel forms the project company while VDTC and other members in the joint venture are the contractor.

The total investment capital for this project is around VND1,200 billion (approx. US$52 million). It is done in 26 years from 2020.

Viettel is in charge of supplying suitable payment methods for customers and simplifying payment procedures to save time.

Meanwhile, the FrontEnd system by VDTC is designed to ensure the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) requested by MoT:

·         Vehicle detection rate of over 99.8 percent,

·         ETC success rate of 100 percent

·         Manual toll collection (MTC) success rate of 100 percent

·         Radio Frequency Identification (RIFD) card reading: success rate of over 99.7 percent

·         Licence plate recognition: success rate of over 95 percent

·         Closing-opening time of automatic barrier: less than 0.6s

·         Response speed of 60KM/h or less and 160KM/h with and without barrier respectively

The BackEnd system by VDTC uses a variety of modern platforms, with such features as:

·         Online Charging System (OCS

·         Cloud computing for backup system

·         Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for registration process

·         Highly precise image processing technology to reduce operation cost for verifying data

·         Automation in daily verifying tasks among BOT (Build-Operation-Transfer) stations to minimize manmade incidents.

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