New App Uses Smartphone GPS to Stop Erroneous Road Tolls

Toll roads can be a hassle for travelers, but perhaps even more so for government agencies that maintain them. Modern toll systems generally involve cameras, license plate readers and software for billing accounts or mailing people letters. When a camera stops reading properly, or there’s a power outage, or a software problem causes something in the roadside infrastructure to go awry, state transportation departments can lose revenue and drivers can be erroneously billed before the problem is discovered.

A California-based company called VeriToll is proposing to use smartphones to crowdsource an easier way to identify those problems.

In a news release last week, VeriToll announced AuditToll, software that uses a mobile app to collect GPS data from drivers’ smartphones and verify that toll systems are working, essentially by checking their location data against the DOT’s records of if, when and how much they were billed.
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