Impact of innovative technologies on highway operators: Tolling organizations’ perspective

Highways play a vivacious role in a country's economic growth, by facilitating movement of both goods and people from one place to another. Over a short period of time, innovation in automobile and information technology has seen an unprecedented growth and this exploratory research highlights the impact of advent of innovative technologies like Autonomous and Connected Vehicles, Internet of Things applications and Big Data analytics on highway operators, as reflected in the opinions of organizations around the world (highway operators, toll agencies, suppliers, consultants and associations). The opinions were collected on a Likert scale type online survey, which was later tested for its empirical significance with non-parametric Binomial and Wilcoxon signed rank tests, supported by descriptive analysis. The research results clearly indicate that these technologies and products are not far from realization and while on one hand they would facilitate highway operations on the other hand they may pose some serious challenges for operators.