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The Westerschelde Tunnel is 6.6 km long with 2 tubes, 14 kilometres of highway and a toll plaza, as well as bridges and viaducts. Construction started in the 4th quarter of 1996 and the tunnel was opened by the Dutch queen on March 14, 2003.
The toll plaza consists of 7 lanes in each direction, 14 in total. For every direction there are 3 manual lanes, 2 automatic lanes where the means of payment are credit card, smart card and T-Tag, and 2 automatic lanes where the only means of payment is the non-stop T-Tag. In the manual lanes all means of payment are accepted.
The T-Tag (High speed electronic tolling) System has been supplied by Efkon. The system is based on active infrared communication and consists of the infrared transceiver mounted above each lane (where it reads the On Board Unit of the vehicle if present) and the Control Unit that receives the data from the reader and transmits these to the Lane Computer. About 60.000 On Board Units have been delivered by Efkon so far.
The system is highly reliable and un-affected by metallic windshields. The exact communication zone prevents cross-talk between lanes and allowed easy combination with the delicate vehicle classification scheme based on vehicle length. Vehicles with an On Board Unit pass the toll plaza with, on average, 30 to 40 kilometres per hour. There are no queues in the automatic lanes using only the T-Tag.
The average number of passages per day is 13.000. 50% of them use the electronic T-Tag System supplied by Efkon.
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