FASTag: Vehicles pile up at limited number of cash lanes

Vehicles lined up at Vanagaram toll plaza near Porur on Chennai Bypass road during the peak hours, forcing toll managers to open all the four toll lanes as hybrid lanes. Since the Vanagaram toll plaza has only four toll lanes managing heavy traffic flow, the officials were not able to manage the vehicle flow by maintaining separate lane for the FASTag only vehicles. When the traffic was less, two lanes were earmarked for the FASTag users.

“I had to wait for at least 10 minutes to cross Vanagaram toll plazas as there was no separate queue for the FASTag vehicles. All the vehicles got mixed up, thanks to the limited number of toll lanes catering to a large number of vehicles,” said J Christopher, a resident of Mogapair who uses the bypass to his office at Mahindra City.

At Surapet toll plaza on the Chennai Bypass road, three out of the six toll lanes were exclusively reserved for FASTag, while the rest were cash lanes. “FASTag only lanes remained largely congestion-free, while cash lanes had long queues,” said an employee at the toll plaza. He said that personnel were deployed ahead of the toll lanes to help guide the vehicles to the FASTag and hybrid lanes.

An official of the NHAI said that the FASTag based transactions have been steadily going up and in some of the plazas along the Chennai-Bengaluru highway, the electronic transactions have crossed over 40 per cent.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways had earlier mandated 100 per cent electronic toll collection on the toll plazas from December 1 but it was differed to December 15. On December 14, the Ministry extended the deadline by another 30 days by mandating electronic toll collection at 75 per cent of the toll lanes.