“Maha Card comes as remedy for De-Congesting the long queue and traffic at major toll plaza’s of Mumbai, PWD (Public Word Department) & MSRDC is coming up with a new toll management system, A Debit Card called ‘Maha Debit Card’ which will get deducted automatically with respected toll amount once the vehicle passes through the toll plaza gates. More proposals like parallel elevated toll plazas are in queue for getting rid of the everyday problems. I will update this post again once Maha Card is operational as not much of information is available other then that of its been proposed for Thane and Navi Mumbai toll nakas..”
How Maha Card Works
There will be a built in sensor inside this Debit card which will be carried by the vehicle owner / driver, When any such vehicle passes through the toll gates which has the automatic sensor readers, it will detect the correct amount to be charged from the card inside the car or any similar vehicle which requires to pay toll amount. Upon detecting the amount automatically the gates gets open (Or possibly their will be no gates, Really don’t know as of now). This will be a special kind of sensor cards which can be recharged monthly. As of date PWD and MSRDC has not mentioned anything about how to recharge those toll cards, if any online recharge options will be available or vehicle owner has to do it manually at toll plazas or might be available elsewhere.
Idea and motive behind the Maha card is to smooth move the traffic accumulated at toll nakas and save time. Another plan has been proposed by MSRDC apart from this card that can be used across Maharashtra state is to set up elevated parallel roads and have toll plazas equally above. With that what i felt is and idea via which equal amount of vehicles can pass by the elevated road and the load at a particular plaza can be reduced with faster and smoother movement of more vehicles at a time. In Thane district (Central Suburb of Mumbai) already a step to de-congest traffic has been taken by increasing the lanes, but this seems to be not possible at all the nakas and also not a long term solution, so is the innovative idea of elevated parallel toll plazas and this debit cards. Few activists also recommends to have RFID devices in places without which all the plans of automation and getting these new sensor cards to deduct amount (As toll paid) will fail. RFID is not a new technology now, many organizations have already implemented it successfully, But don’t know why government organizations seems to ignore it at few departments and locations like this toll booths situations.
A great solution and example is ‘Efkon India’, which is a organization who does this fantastic work of giving products and services related to ‘Electronic Traffic Management Systems’ and more such. Some of the fantastic features of such an automatic product related to toll plazas are Automatic (Semi & Fully) to collect toll amount, Every individual lanes can be set up to collect tolls electronically, It has features to classify each vehicle and set up toll amount accordingly. It will helps lower revenue loss from those who skips giving toll charges or from any corrupt employee coordinating and doing such activities. The system also has a beautiful operating interface and customized reporting system for accurate amount collections.
